Poor Man’s Broadband: LUMS Research Featured in New Scientist
A few months ago I wrote about DRITTE and the interesting research work by Umar Saif and team at LUMS. One of their projects is  Peer-to-Peer Dialup Networking which aims to mitigate the digital divide by creating efficiencies from dialup Internet. Also called poor man’s broadband, the concept is as illustrated below.
 
This work, funded by Microsoft Research’s Digital Inclusion Grant, was featured in New Scientist. Note that lack of cheap ‘local bandwidth’ in Pakistan is something which has been discussed actively on blogs and forums (here and here).
Here is the abstract of the paper:
In this paper we present a peer-to-peer dialup architecture for accelerated “Internet access” in the developing world. Our proposed architecture provides a mechanism for multiplexing the scarce and expensive international Internet bandwidth over higher bandwidth p2p 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 paper presents a detailed design, implementation and evaluation of our dialup p2p data transfer architecture inspired by Bittorrent.
For more information see this review at SIGCOMM site. You can also download the paper from there. The authors include Umar Saif, Ahsan Latif Chudhary, Shakeel Butt, and Nabeel Farooq Butt. Great job, congratulations to the team!
I will write more about their other interesting projects soon. Here’s an excerpt from New Scientist (subscription needed) article:
IT’S not often that you get to go faster by avoiding the superhighway, but soon students in Pakistan will be able to download big files faster by avoiding the internet.
Instead of using expensive broadband or slow, unreliable dial-up connections, students at Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS) will try out a new system, dubbed “poor man’s broadband” (PMB). It allows computers to link to each other directly for faster downloads, and it works as long as at least one computer running the trial software has already downloaded the desired file from the internet. The system should also reduce the university’s risk of overloading the bandwidth supplied by its internet service providers (ISPs).
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