1 research outputs found
Designing Low Cost and Energy Efficient Access Network for the Developing World
Internet is growing rapidly in the developing world now. Our survey of four
networks in India, all having at least one thousand users, suggest that both
installation cost and recurring cost due to power consumption pose a challenge
in its deployment in developing countries. In this paper, we first model the
access design problem by dividing the users in two types 1) those that may
access the network anytime and 2) those who need it only during office hours on
working days. The problem is formulated as a binary integer linear program
which turns out to be NP-hard. We then give a distributed heuristic for network
design. We evaluate our model and heuristic using real data collected from IIT
Kanpur LAN for more than 50 days. Results show that even in a tree topology --
which is a common characteristic of all networks who participated in our study,
our design can reduce the energy consumption of the network by up to 11% in
residential-cum-office environments and up to 22% in office-only environments
in comparison with current methods without giving up on the performance. The
extra cost incurred due to our design can be compensated in less than an year
by saving in electricity bill of the network