A Peer-to-Peer Internet for the Developing World

Umar Saif, Ahsan Latif Chudhary, Shakeel Butt, Nabeel Farooq Butt, Ghulam Murtaza

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.

Keywords


Peer-to-Peer; P2P; developing world; Internet; digital divide; BitTorrent; intelligent connection; interleaving; content-prefetching

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