VillageShare: facilitating content generation and sharing in rural networks

  • Authors:

  • David L. Johnson;Veljko Pejovic;Elizabeth M. Belding;Gertjan van Stam

  • Affiliations:

  • University of California, Santa Barbara;University of California, Santa Barbara;University of California, Santa Barbara;Linknet, Macha, Zambia

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 2nd ACM Symposium on Computing for Development
  • Year:
  • 2012

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Abstract

While broadband Internet connectivity has reached a significant part of the world's population, those living in rural areas of the developing world suffer from poor Internet connectivity over slow long distance links, if they even have connectivity at all. While this has a general negative impact on Internet utilization, our social survey of users in the community of Macha, Zambia shows that the severest impact is in the area of content generation and sharing. To this end, our work describes VillageShare, an integrated time-delayed proxy server and content-sharing Facebook application. Through these two components, VillageShare facilitates localization of traffic, protecting the bandwidth-limited Internet link from content shared between local users, and minimizes upload abortions by time-shifting large uploads to periods when the gateway link is under-utilized. In this work we analyze traffic traces from Macha to discern opportunities for improvement of connection utilization, and then describe and evaluate the VillageShare architecture.