Turning the postal system into a generic digital communication mechanism

Abstract

The phenomenon that rural residents and people with low incomes lag behind in Internet access is known as the "digital divide." This problem is particularly acute in developing countries, where most of the world's population lives. Bridging this digital divide, especially by attempting to increase the accessibility of broadband connectivity, can be challenging. The improvement of wide-area connectivity is constrained by factors such as how quickly we can dig ditches to bury fibers in the ground; and the cost of furnishing "last-mile" wiring can be prohibitively high.In this paper, we explore the use of digital storage media transported by the postal system as a general digital communication mechanism. While some companies have used the postal system to deliver software and movies, none of them has turned the postal system into a truly generic digital communication medium supporting a wide variety of applications. We call such a generic system a Postmanet. Compared to traditional wide-area connectivity options, the Postmanet has several important advantages, including wide global reach, great bandwidth potential and low cost.Manually preparing mobile storage devices for shipment may appear deceptively simple, but with many applications, communicating parties and messages, manual management becomes infeasible, and systems support at several levels becomes necessary. We explore the simultaneous exploitation of the Internet and the Postmanet, so we can combine their latency and bandwidth advantages to enable sophisticated bandwidth-intensive applications.

Designing an architecture for delivering mobile information services to the rural developing world

“…Several researchers have proposed store-and-forward networks based on transport of physical media as a high-bandwidth, high-latency communications alternative for rural areas in the developing world [27,40,4]. Most of this work has focused on the networking requirements.…”

Evaluation of Queueing Policies and Forwarding Strategies for Routing in Intermittently Connected Networks

“…Considering the transitive kind of communication studied in this paper, it is particularly important to select a good mobility model. In some of the previous work, the authors have used random waypoint mobility or variations of it [16,19], mobility that has been constrained to some fixed schedule [13,18], or mobility data gathered from some real-life measurements [8]. In our simulations we have used the community mobility model developed in [ 1], inspired by the mobility of nodes in a Saami community [4,15].…”

Investigating MapReduce framework extensions for efficient processing of geographically scattered datasets

“…Jim Gray [1], DOT project [6] and the PostManet project [7] have proposed using postal service as an alternative option for large-scale data transfer over the Internet. This approach is only suitable in environments where a small set of source sites infrequently transfer bulk datasets to a single destination.…”