Delay tolerant applications for low bandwidth and intermittently connected users: the aAQUA experience

ABSTRACT

With the explosive growth and spread of Internet, web access from mobile and rural users has become significant. But these users face problems of low bandwidth and intermittent Internet connectivity. To make the benefits of the Internet reach the common man in developing countries, accessibility and availability of the information has to be improved. aAQUA is an online multilingual, multimedia agricultural portal for disseminating information from and to rural communities. Considering resource constrained rural environments, we have designed and implemented an offline solution which provides an online experience to users in disconnected mode. Our solution is based on heterogeneous database synchronization which involves only a small synchronization payload ensuring an efficient use of available bandwidth. Offline aAQUA has been deployed in the field and systematic studies of our solution show that user experience has improved tremendously not only in disconnected mode but also in connected mode.

REFERENCES

• 1: R. Post P. De Bra. Searching for arbitrary information in the WWW: the fish-search for Mosaic. In Proceedings of the WWW conference, 1994.
• 2: Krithi Ramamritham , Anil Bahuman , Subhasri Duttagupta, aAqua: a database-backended multilingual, multimedia community forum, Proceedings of the 2006 ACM SIGMOD international conference on Management of data, June 27-29, 2006, Chicago, IL, USA [doi>10.1145/1142473.1142589]
• 3: Sean C. Rhea , Kevin Liang , Eric Brewer, Value-based web caching, Proceedings of the 12th international conference on World Wide Web, May 20-24, 2003, Budapest, Hungary [doi>10.1145/775152.775239]
• 4: S. Sahni and K. Ramamritham. Designing delay tolerant applications for low bandwidth and intermittently connected users: the aAQUA experience. Technical report, IIT Bombay, 2007. http://www.it.iitb.ac.in/research/techreport/reports/43.pdf.

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.3 INFORMATION STORAGE AND RETRIEVAL
      H.3.5 On-line Information Services
          Subjects: Web-based services

General Terms:
Design, Human Factors, Performance

Keywords:
caching, heterogeneous database synchronization, information and communication technologies for development, low-bandwidth application, offline access, resource constrained low end PCs