Network traffic, rural Africa, ICT, Facebook in rural Africa

Network traffic locality in a rural African village

by Gertjan van Stam

D.J. Johnson, E.M. Belding, and G. van Stam, ICTD March 2012, Atlanta, Georgia USA

The Internet is evolving from a system of connections between humans and machines to a new paradigm of social... more The Internet is evolving from a system of connections between humans and machines to a new paradigm of social connection. However, it is still dominated by a hub and spoke architecture with inter-connectivity between users typically requiring connections to a common server on the Internet. This creates a large amount of traffic that must traverse an Internet gateway, even when users communicate with each other in a local network. Nowhere is this inefficiency more pronounced than in rural areas with low-bandwidth connectivity to the Internet. Our previous work in a rural village in Macha, Zambia showed that web traffic, and social networking in particular, are dominant services. In this paper we use a recent network trace, from this same village, to explore the degree of local user-to-user interaction in the village. Extraction of a social graph, using instant message interactions on Facebook, reveals that 54% of the messages are between local users. Traffic analysis highlights that the potential spare capacity of the local network is not utilized for direct local communication between users even though indirect communication between local users is routed through services on the Internet. These findings build a strong motivation for a new rural network architecture that places services that enable user-to-user interaction and file sharing in the village.