Low-resource and tribal languages in India are at acute risk of digital extinction because contemporary language technologies overwhelmingly target high-resource languages and centralized, cloud-hosted large models that are expensive to train, deploy, and adapt. Centralized automatic speech recognition (ASR) and text-to-speech (TTS) pipelines require large amounts of labelled data, stable connectivity, and significant compute resources, all of which are misaligned with the infrastructural realities and socio-economic conditions of many tribal communities in India. These constraints are particularly visible for the Soliga community, a Dravidian-language-speaking tribe in the Biligiri Rangaswamy Hills of Karnataka, whose language has no widely used script and for which digital resources remain scarce. We present a socio-technical framework and prototype for building low-cost voice models with and for the Soliga tribe using offline, edge-based federated learning. The framework combines community-governed data collection and consent processes, on-device training of compact ASR and keyword-spotting models, and an intermittent-connectivity aggregation protocol that runs on low-cost edge hardware. Our experiments show that, even with only 5 hours of Soliga speech, a centralized Wav2Vec 2.0 baseline achieves a word error rate (WER) of 37.95% and character error rate (CER) of 11.11%, and that a federated frugal architecture trained on the same small corpus can approach this performance (WER 44.20%, CER 15.80%) while keeping data local and under community control.

Despite increasing mobile Internet penetration in developing regions, growing web page complexity and the lack of optimization from remote content providers make the web experience poor in these areas. The high relative bandwidth cost, poor network performance, and lack of relevant local content combine to dampen the demand for the Internet and services it enables. In this paper we propose GAIUS, a content ecosystem enabling efficient creation and dissemination of locally relevant web content. At its core, GAIUS consists of the following innovations: a locally sustainable content ecosystem, and MAML, a web specification language that simplifies web pages to reduce costs and lower barriers for content creation.

Summary Decentralization, in the form of mesh networking and blockchain, two promising technologies, is coming to the telecommunications industry. Mesh networking allows wider low‐cost Internet access with infrastructures built from routers contributed by diverse owners, whereas blockchain enables transparency and accountability for investments, revenue, or other forms of economic compensations from sharing of network traffic, content, and services. Crowdsourcing network coverage, combined with crowdfunding costs, can create economically sustainable yet decentralized Internet access. This means that every participant can invest in resources and pay or be paid for usage to recover the costs of network devices and maintenance. While mesh networks and mesh routing protocols enable self‐organized networks that expand organically, cryptocurrencies and smart contracts enable the economic coordination among network providers and consumers. We explore and evaluate two existing blockchain software stacks, Hyperledger Fabric (HLF) and Ethereum geth with Proof of Authority (PoA) intended as a local lightweight distributed ledger, deployed in a real city‐wide production mesh network and in laboratory network. We quantify the performance and bottlenecks and identify the current limitations and opportunities for improvement to serve locally the needs of wireless mesh networks, without the privacy and economic cost of relying on public blockchains.

Despite increasing mobile Internet penetration in emerging regions, the growth of web page complexity combined with inadequate content delivery mechanisms and lack of relevant local content make the web experience poor for users in these regions. In this paper, we propose GAIUS, a content ecosystem that enables the efficient creation and dissemination of locally relevant web content. GAIUS aims at creating a community content exchange that enables users to easily create and consume relevant web content with the help of a mobile application. Based on an early deployment of GAIUS in various regions, we show that our ecosystem enables localized content creation and diffusion efficiently.

Community networks (CNs) have gained momentum in the last few years with the increasing number of spontaneously deployed WiFi hotspots and home networks. These networks, owned and managed by volunteers, offer various services to their members and to the public. While Internet access is the most popular service, the provision of services of local interest within the network is enabled by the emerging technology of CN micro-clouds. By putting services closer to users, micro-clouds pursue not only a better service performance, but also a low entry barrier for the deployment of mainstream Internet services within the CN. Unfortunately, the provisioning of these services is not so simple. Due to the large and irregular topology, high software and hardware diversity of CNs, a “careful” placement of micro-clouds services over the network is required to optimize service performance. This paper proposes to leverage state information about the network to inform service placement decisions, and to do so through a fast heuristic algorithm, which is critical to quickly react to changing conditions. To evaluate its performance, we compare our heuristic with one based on random placement in Guifi.net, the biggest CN worldwide. Our experimental results show that our heuristic consistently outperforms random placement by 2x in bandwidth gain. We quantify the benefits of our heuristic on a real live video-streaming service, and demonstrate that video chunk losses decrease significantly, attaining a 37% decrease in the packet loss rate. Further, using a popular Web 2.0 service, we demonstrate that the client response times decrease up to an order of magnitude when using our heuristic. Since these improvements translate in the QoE (Quality of Experience) perceived by the user, our results are relevant for contributing to higher QoE, a crucial parameter for using services from volunteer-based systems and adapting CN micro-clouds as an eco-system for service deployment.

Edge computing is shaping the way to run services in the Internet by allowing the computations to become available close to the user's proximity. Many implementations have been recently proposed to facilitate the service delivery in data centers and distributed networks. However, we argue that those implementations cannot fully support the operations in Community Mesh Networks (CMNs) since the network connection is highly intermittent and unreliable. In this paper, we propose PiCasso, a novel multi-access edge computing platform that combines the advances in lightweight virtualisation and Information-Centric Networking (ICN). PiCasso utilises in-network caching and name based routing of ICN to optimise the forwarding path of service delivery. We analyse the data collected from Guifi.net, the biggest CMN worldwide, to develop smart heuristic for the service deployment. Through a real deployment in Guifi.net, we show that our service deployment heuristic HANET (HArdware and NETwork Resources), improves the response time up to 53% and 28.7% for stateless and stateful services respectively. Finally, using PiCasso for the service delivery in Guifi.net, we achieve 43% traffic reduction compared to the traditional host-centric communication.

This paper presents the results of spectrum occupancy measurements carried out in three different locations in Thailand: the Pathum Thani province (suburban), Bangkok (urban), and the Mae Kasa sub-district (rural) in the Tak province using a low-cost spectrum analyzer based system to show the spectrum occupancy at UHF TV band for testing the feasibility of TV White Space (TVWS) technology. Furthermore, inaccuracy of fixed threshold setting while performing spectrum occupancy measurements is shown by comparing the data with the ground truth report from the National Broadcasting and Telecommunications Commission (NBTC). An adaptive threshold setting algorithm, namely, Forward Consecutive Mean Excision (FCME) is then applied for determining the performance while carrying out spectrum occupancy measurements. Additionally, the adaptive threshold setting is modified to improve the accuracy of spectrum detection making the resultant spectrum occupancy more reliable.

The Internet in Africa is evolving rapidly, yet remains significantly behind other regions in terms of performance and ubiquity of access. This clearly has negative consequences for the residents of Africa, but also has implications for organisations designing future networked technologies that might see deployment in the region. This paper presents a measurement campaign methodology to explore the current state of the African Internet. Using vantage points across the continent, we perform the first large-scale mapping of inter-country delays in Africa. Our analysis reveals a number of clusters, where countries have built up low delay interconnectivity, dispelling the myth that intra-communications in Africa are universally poor. Unfortunately, this does not extend to the remainder of the continent, which typically suffers from excessively high delays, often exceeding 300ms. We find that in many cases it is faster to reach European or North American networks that those in other regions of Africa. By mapping the internetwork topology, we identify a number of shortcomings in the infrastructure, most notably an excessive reliance on intercontinental transit providers.

It is well known that internet infrastructure deployment is progressing at a rapid pace in the African continent. A flurry of recent research has quantified this, highlighting the expansion of its underlying connectivity network. However, improving the infrastructure is not useful without appropriately provisioned services to exploit it. This article measures the availability and utilisation of web infrastructure in Africa. Whereas others have explored web infrastructure in developed regions, we shed light on practices in developing regions. To achieve this, we apply a comprehensive measurement methodology to collect data from a variety of sources. We first focus on Google to reveal that its content infrastructure in Africa is, indeed, expanding. That said, we find that much of its web content is still served from the US and Europe, despite being the most popular website in many African countries. We repeat the same analysis across a number of other regionally popular websites to find that even top African websites prefer to host their content abroad. To explore the reasons for this, we evaluate some of the major bottlenecks facing content delivery networks (CDNs) in Africa. Amongst other factors, we find a lack of peering between the networks hosting our probes, preventing the sharing of CDN servers, as well as poorly configured DNS resolvers. Finally, our mapping of middleboxes in the region reveals that there is a greater presence of transparent proxies in Africa than in Europe or the US. We conclude the work with a number of suggestions for alleviating the issues observed.

The success of Wi-Fi technology as an efficient and low-cost last-mile access solution has enabled massive spontaneous deployments generating storms of beacons all across the globe. Emerging location systems are using these beacons to observe mobility patterns of people through portable or wearable devices and offer use-cases that can help solve critical problems in the developing world. In this paper, we design and develop a novel prototype to organise these spontaneous deployments of Access Points into what we call virtual cells (vcells). We compute virtual cells from a list of Access Points collected from different active scans for a geographical region. We argue that virtual cells can be encoded using Bloom filters to implement the location process. Lastly, we present two illustrative use-cases to showcase the suitability and challenges of the technique.

Headers are a critical part of HTTP, and it has been shown that they are increasingly subject to middlebox manipulation. Although this is well known, little is understood about the general regional and network trends that underpin these manipulations. In this paper, we collect data on thousands of networks to understand how they intercept HTTP headers in-the-wild. Our analysis reveals that 25% of measured ASes modify HTTP headers. Beyond this, we witness distinct trends among different regions and AS types; e.g., we observe high numbers of cache headers in poorly connected regions. Finally, we perform an in-depth analysis of the types of manipulations and how they differ across regions.

IEEE 802.11 networks are the most popular option to have wireless access to the Internet. The popularity of these networks have raised a costly topology discovery and connection process, in which any device has to pass through an expensive scanning process of available Access Points. In order to improve the connection process, we propose a novel architecture for asynchronous assistance for topology discovery. We discuss the role of a Topology Manager that uses computational intelligence for generating optimal scanning sequences. Preliminary results show that this approach results in 30% to 70% improvements on AP discovery rate in chaotic deployments.

An unexpected increase in natural disasters has prompted a large interest in governments and organisations to utilise ICT for many different purposes such as preparation, impact mitigation, loss reduction and relief efforts. This paper presents initial work on studying disaster scenarios from device level perspective to characterise network infrastructural behaviour during extraordinary situations. We find connectivity challenges during disasters and observe sharp decline of quality metrics and loss of station quantity between ordinary and extraordinary time periods. We also make distinctions between usual and unusual behaviour seen during ordinary and extraordinary situations.

Novel network systems need to be carefully evaluated before their actual deployments in developing regions. However, large-scale network experiment is a challenging task. Simulations, emulations, and real-world testbeds all have their advantages and disadvantages. In this paper we present LiteLab, a light-weight platform specialized for large-scale networking experiments. We cover in detail its design, key features, and architecture. We also perform an extensive evaluation of Lite-Lab's performance and accuracy and show that it is able to both simulate network parameters with high accuracy, and also able to scale up to very large networks. LiteLab is flexible, easy to deploy, and allows researchers to perform large-scale network experiments with a short development cycle. We have used LiteLab for many different kinds of network experiments and are planning to make it available for others to use as well.

In this paper, we present a novel idea of multipath multicast, which is imperative to bandwidth intensive applications, in the context of multimedia streaming. In addition to congestion control, multipath TCP (MPTCP) has been proposed to establish multiple paths in a network to improve network reliability. Application-layer multicast (ALM) has been proposed to leverage end systems instead of dedicated routers to multicast that is important for an easy large-scale deployment as compared to IP-based multicast. This paper presents our novel idea of multipath multicast in the form of a simple experimental framework called MP-ALM in which we combine the multiplicity feature of MPTCP with the application-layer multicast (ALM). We extensively simulate MP-ALM using ns-3 and use iPerf to generate streaming multicast-MPTCP traffic. Simulation results show that MP-ALM can be beneficial for a better user experience and reduced overall network congestion in the perspective of multicast multimedia streaming.

Seamless computing and service sharing in community networks (CNs) have gained momentum due to the emerging technology of community network micro-clouds (CNMCs). However, deploying and running services in CNMCs confront enormous challenges to cope with, such as the dynamic nature of micro-clouds, limited capacity of nodes and links, asymmetric quality of wireless links, geographic singularity based deployment model rather than network QoS based, etc. CNMCs have been increasingly used by network-intensive services which exchange significant amounts of data between nodes, therefore their performance heavily relies on the available bandwidth resource in a network. This paper proposes a novel bandwidth-aware service placement algorithm which aims to replace the current random placement adopted by Guifi.net. Our experimental results show that the proposed BASP algorithm consistently outperforms the random placement in Guifi.net by 35% regarding its bandwidth gain. More promisingly, as the number of services increases, the gain tends to increase accordingly.

In this paper, we provide an initial evaluation of a home smart lighting system - demonstrating the advantages of ICN paradigm through the primitive features of NDN architecture. A prototype of NDN based smart home lighting was developed and benchmarked against the IP cloud based approach.

It is well known that Africa's mobile and fixed Internet infrastructure is progressing at a rapid pace. A flurry of recent research has quantified this, highlighting the expansion of its underlying connectivity network. However, improving the infrastructure is not useful without appropriately provisioned services to utilise it. This paper measures the availability of web content infrastructure in Africa. Whereas others have explored web infrastructure in developed regions, we shed light on practices in developing regions. To achieve this, we apply a comprehensive measurement methodology to collect data from a variety of sources. We focus on a large content delivery network to reveal that Africa's content infrastructure is, indeed, expanding. However, we find much web content is still served from the US and Europe. We discover that many of the problems faced are actually caused by significant inter-AS delays in Africa, which contribute to local ISPs not sharing their cache capacity. We discover that a related problem is the poor DNS configuration used by some ISPs, which confounds the attempts of providers to optimise their delivery. We then explore a number of other websites to show that large web infrastructure deployments are a rarity in Africa and that even regional websites host their services abroad. We conclude by making suggestions for improvements.

No abstract available.

Universal access to Internet is crucial, and as such, there have been several initiatives to enable wider access to the Internet. Public AccessWiFi Service (PAWS) is one such initiative that takes advantage of the the available unused capacity in home broadband connections and allows Less-than-Best Effort (LBE) access to these resources, as advocated by Lowest Cost Denominator Networking (LCDNet). PAWS has been recently deployed in a deprived community in Nottingham, and, as any crowd-shared network, it faces limited coverage, since there is a single point of Internet access per guest user, whose availability depends on user sharing policies. To mitigate this problem and extend the coverage, we consider a crowd-shared wireless mesh network (WMN) in which the home routers are interconnected as a mesh. Such a network provides multiple points of Internet access and can enable resource pooling across all available paths to the Internet backhaul. In this paper, we investigate the potential benefits of a crowd-shared WMN for public Internet access by performing a comparative study between such a network and PAWS. To this end, we present a software-defined WMN control plane for the coordination of traffic redirections through the WMN and an algorithm for Internet access point selection. Our simulation results show that a crowd-shared WMN can provide much higher utilization of the shared bandwidth and can accommodate a substantially larger volume of guest user traffic.

International audience

Digital video broadcast return channel via satellite system (RCS) is a key European standard that specifies a broadband satellite system using dynamic capacity assignment and multi-frequency time-division multiple access. This study introduces new architectural components for an RCS system to support advanced Internet protocol (IP)-oriented multimedia. This will allow closer integration of satellite networks with the next generation of multimedia-enabled networks enabling operators to offer triple-play services that simultaneously support voice over IP, television-over IP and other services. These types of services are particularly suited to next generation satellite systems that combine transparent and multi-spot beam satellites with on-board regenerative signal processing, and can evolve to use adaptive coding and modulation.

The datagram congestion control protocol (DCCP) is a new IETF-defined transport protocol for Internet multimedia. The DCCP congestion control identifier 4 (CCID4) was specifically designed to support the stream of small packets generated by applications such as voice over IP (VoIP). This uses equation based congestion control. The long round trip delay when the path includes a satellite link could therefore degrade the performance of VoIP. In this paper, we analyze using simulation the performance of VoIP using CCID4 over a DVB-RCS network. We also analyze the different variants of CCID4 that have been proposed. The paper concludes that the current algorithm of CCID4 suffers for paths with appreciable delay when used to support voice calls with a bursty nature. The results show that these effects are only partially mitigated by the currently proposed variants of CCID4.