RuralCafe: web search in the rural developing world

ABSTRACT

The majority of people in rural developing regions do not have access to the World Wide Web. Traditional network connectivity technologies have proven to be prohibitively expensive in these areas. The emergence of new long-range wireless technologies provide hope for connecting these rural regions to the Internet. However, the network connectivity provided by these new solutions are by nature intermittent due to high network usage rates, frequent power-cuts and the use of delay tolerant links. Typical applications, especially interactive applications like web search, do not tolerate intermittent connectivity. In this paper, we present the design and implementation of RuralCafe, a system intended to support efficient web search over intermittent networks. RuralCafe enables users to perform web search asynchronously and find what they are looking for in one round of intermittency as opposed to multiple rounds of search/downloads. RuralCafe does this by providing an expanded search query interface which allows a user to specify additional query terms to maximize the utility of the results returned by a search query. Given knowledge of the limited available network resources, RuralCafe performs optimizations to prefetch pages to best satisfy a search query based on a user's search preferences. In addition, RuralCafe does not require modifications to the web browser, and can provide single round search results tailored to various types of networks and economic constraints. We have implemented and evaluated the effectiveness of RuralCafe using queries from logs made to a large search engine, queries made by users in an intermittent setting, and live queries from a small testbed deployment. We have also deployed a prototype of RuralCafe in Kerala, India.

REFERENCES

• 1: Aruna Balasubramanian , Brian Neil Levine , Arun Venkataramani, Enhancing interactive web applications in hybrid networks, Proceedings of the 14th ACM international conference on Mobile computing and networking, September 14-19, 2008, San Francisco, California, USA [doi>10.1145/1409944.1409954]
• 2: Aruna Balasubramanian , Yun Zhou , W. Bruce Croft , Brian Neil Levine , Aruna Venkataramani, Web search from a bus, Proceedings of the second ACM workshop on Challenged networks, September 14-14, 2007, Montreal, Quebec, Canada [doi>10.1145/1287791.1287803]
• 3: Jay Chen , Lakshminarayanan Subramanian , Kentaro Toyama, Web search and browsing behavior under poor connectivity, Proceedings of the 27th international conference extended abstracts on Human factors in computing systems, April 04-09, 2009, Boston, MA, USA [doi>10.1145/1520340.1520505]
• 4: Michael Demmer , Bowei Du , Eric Brewer, TierStore: a distributed filesystem for challenged networks in developing regions, Proceedings of the 6th USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies, p.1-14, February 26-29, 2008, San Jose, California
• 5: M. Demmer, K. Fall, T. Koponen, and S. Shenker. Towards a Modern Communications API. Hotnets, 2007.
• 6: Bowei Du , Michael Demmer , Eric Brewer, Analysis of WWW traffic in Cambodia and Ghana, Proceedings of the 15th international conference on World Wide Web, May 23-26, 2006, Edinburgh, Scotland [doi>10.1145/1135777.1135894]
• 7: K. Fall. A delay tolerant network architecture for challenged internets, 2003.
• 8: Bret Hull , Vladimir Bychkovsky , Yang Zhang , Kevin Chen , Michel Goraczko , Allen Miu , Eugene Shih , Hari Balakrishnan , Samuel Madden, CarTel: a distributed mobile sensor computing system, Proceedings of the 4th international conference on Embedded networked sensor systems, October 31-November 03, 2006, Boulder, Colorado, USA [doi>10.1145/1182807.1182821]
• 9: Sibren Isaacman , Margaret Martonosi, Potential for collaborative caching and prefetching in largely-disconnected villages, Proceedings of the 2008 ACM workshop on Wireless networks and systems for developing regions, September 19-19, 2008, San Francisco, California, USA [doi>10.1145/1410064.1410070]
• 10: Sushant Jain , Kevin Fall , Rabin Patra, Routing in a delay tolerant network, ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review, v.34 n.4, October 2004
• 11: L. Levison, W. Thies, and S. Amarasinghe. Providing Web search capability for low-connectivity communities. ISTAS, pages 87--91, 2002.
• 12: Linguistic Data Consortium. http://www.ldc.upenn.edu.
• 13: Loband. http://www.loband.org.
• 14: A. Meacham. The Case for SmartTrack. NYU Technical Report, 2008.
• 15: S. Mubaraq, J. Hwang, D. Filippini, R. Moazzami, L. Subramanian, and T. Du. Economic analysis of networking technologies for rural developing regions. Workshop on Internet Economics, 2005.
• 16: J. Ott and D. Kutscher. Drive-thru Internet: IEEE 802.11 b for" automobile" users. INFOCOM, 2004.
• 17: J. Ott and D. Kutscher. Bundling the Web: HTTP over DTN. WNEPT, 2006.
• 18: Greg Pass , Abdur Chowdhury , Cayley Torgeson, A picture of search, Proceedings of the 1st international conference on Scalable information systems, p.1-es, May 30-June 01, 2006, Hong Kong [doi>10.1145/1146847.1146848]
• 19: R. Patra, S. Nedevschi, S. Surana, A. Sheth, L. Subramanian, and E. Brewer. WiLDNet: Design and Implementation of High Performance WiFi Based Long Distance Networks. NSDI, 2007.
• 20: Alex (Sandy) Pentland , Richard Fletcher , Amir Hasson, DakNet: Rethinking Connectivity in Developing Nations, Computer, v.37 n.1, p.78-83, January 2004 [doi>10.1109/MC.2004.1260729]
• 21: M. Rabinovich and O. Spatscheck. Web Caching and Replication. SIGMOD Record, 32(4):107, 2003.
• 22: Daniel E. Rose , Danny Levinson, Understanding user goals in web search, Proceedings of the 13th international conference on World Wide Web, May 17-20, 2004, New York, NY, USA [doi>10.1145/988672.988675]
• 23: Rural BPO. http://www.icmrindia.org/casestudies/catalogue/Businesstm.
• 24: A. Seth , D. Kroeker , M. Zaharia , S. Guo , S. Keshav, Low-cost communication for rural internet kiosks using mechanical backhaul, Proceedings of the 12th annual international conference on Mobile computing and networking, September 23-29, 2006, Los Angeles, CA, USA [doi>10.1145/1161089.1161127]
• 25: L. Subramanian, S. Nedevschi, R. Patra, S. Surana, A. Sheth, and E. Brewer. Rethinking Wireless for the Developing World. Hotnets, 2006.
• 26: Sonesh Surana , Rabin Patra , Sergiu Nedevschi , Manuel Ramos , Lakshminarayanan Subramanian , Yahel Ben-David , Eric Brewer, Beyond pilots: keeping rural wireless networks alive, Proceedings of the 5th USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation, p.119-132, April 16-18, 2008, San Francisco, California
• 27: W. Thies et al. Searching the world wide web in low-connectivity communities. WWW, 2002.
• 28: United Villages. http://www.unitedvillages.com.
• 29: Randolph Y. Wang , Sumeet Sobti , Nitin Garg , Elisha Ziskind , Junwen Lai , Arvind Krishnamurthy, Turning the postal system into a generic digital communication mechanism, Proceedings of the 2004 conference on Applications, technologies, architectures, and protocols for computer communications, August 30-September 03, 2004, Portland, Oregon, USA
• 30: WiMAX forum. http://www.wimaxforum.org.
• 31: Yahoo One Search. http://mobile.yahoo.com/onesearch.
• 32: L. Zhang, S. Michel, K. Nguyen, A. Rosenstein, S. Floyd, and V. Jacobson. Adaptive Web Caching: Towards a New Global Caching Architecture. Third International Caching Workshop, June, 1998.
• 33: Xiaolan Zhang , Jim Kurose , Brian Neil Levine , Don Towsley , Honggang Zhang, Study of a bus-based disruption-tolerant network: mobility modeling and impact on routing, Proceedings of the 13th annual ACM international conference on Mobile computing and networking, September 09-14, 2007, Montréal, Québec, Canada [doi>10.1145/1287853.1287876]

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.3 INFORMATION STORAGE AND RETRIEVAL
      H.3.3 Information Search and Retrieval

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

General Terms:
Design, Experimentation, Performance

Keywords:
intermittent network, low bandwidth, web search, world wide web