Poster Title:
Delay Tolerant Applications for Low Bandwidth and Intermittently Connected Users: the aAQUA Experience
Authors:
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.