A Peer-to-Peer Internet for the Developing World

Abstract

Users in the developing world are typically forced to access the Internet at a fraction of the speed achievable by a standard v.90 modem. In this article, we present an architecture to enable offline access to the Internet at the maximum possible speed achievable by a standard modem. Our proposed architecture provides a mechanism for multiplexing the scarce and expensive international Internet bandwidth over higher bandwidth P2P (peer-to-peer) dialup connections within a developing country. Our system combines a number of architectural components, such as incentive-driven P2P data transfer, intelligent connection interleaving, and content-prefetching. This article presents a detailed design, implementation, and evaluation of our dialup P2P data transfer architecture inspired by BitTorrent.