Abstract
Rural areas in economically developing regions often suffer from a slow and unreliable communication network infrastructure, which turns out to be a common bottleneck limiting access to content and services that promote economic growth. We report here how Delay Tolerant Networking (DTN) can serve micro-business opportunities in such challenged locations. A DTN field trial conducted in 2015 in rural South Africa is examined to evaluate DTN architectures to best enable content distribution in areas where affordable communication channels are not fully available. The use-case in the trial was the support of micro-entrepreneurs that had been given access to simple cinema-in-a-backpack kits (battery, mobile projector and WLAN connection, plus software) that opportunistically connect to a DTN in the area. The network enabled the micro-entrepreneurs to order, receive, and screen movies at locations in under-served regions and in addition to invent and to execute micro-business activities around the screenings. The digital content was distributed to the micro-entrepreneurs by means of a DTN network with mobile infostations (wireless DTN-enabled devices) mounted on public transportation vehicles (commuter buses). In this paper, we present a six-month long field deployment that was organized in partnership with local institutions. We discuss the technical implications and make recommendations to support a socio-economic development in the under-served regions of rural South Africa.
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Acknowledgment
The MOSAIC_2B project is partially funded by the EU FP7 framework program for research, technological development and demonstration under grant agreement no. 611796, as well as from the Department of Science and Technology South Africa under financial assistance agreement DST/CON 0227-0229/2013. We thank Johannes Morgenroth and the team of Lars Wolf at Techn. Univ. Braunschweig, Germany, for providing support on their IBR-DTN. We thank the South African partners, Infusion, Epi-Use, the University of Pretoria, and the PUTCO transport corporation in Pretoria (South Africa) for their support in this project.
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Galati, A., Sazonovs, A., Olivares, M., Mangold, S., Gross, T.R. (2017). Delay Tolerant Networking for the Socio-Economic Development in Rural South Africa. In: Gaggi, O., Manzoni, P., Palazzi, C., Bujari, A., Marquez-Barja, J. (eds) Smart Objects and Technologies for Social Good. GOODTECHS 2016. Lecture Notes of the Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering, vol 195. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-61949-1_21
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-61949-1_21
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