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.