The C-LINK System for Collaborative Web Usage: A Real-World Deployment in Rural Nicaragua
Sibren Isaacman, Margaret Martonosi · 2009
Information exchange is one of the most crucial elements of education and business in the modern world. Therefore, equipping developing regions with access to the internet is becoming increasingly important. Though many regions will not receive broadband, wired connections in the near future, limited connectivity is rapidly become available. The connectivity may come from the increasing density of mobile devices or from novel delay-tolerant approaches. In this paper we demonstrate a collaborative caching system we have developed that allows for such connectivity. Further, we report on our experiences deploying our system in rural Nicaragua. We show that collaborative caching allows miss rates to drop in half through the course of the deployment, and that user satisfaction remains high despite long round trip times. Although general web access is sometimes viewed as not amenable to collaborative caching and prefetching, our data shows value in collaboration, with 74% of pages accessed by more than one user. 1