Delay Tolerant Networking for the Socio-Economic Development in Rural South Africa.

Rural areas in economically developing regions often suffer from a slow and unreliable communication network infrastructure, which turns out to be a common bottleneck limiting access to content and services that promote economic growth. We report here how Delay Tolerant Networking (DTN) can serve micro-business opportunities in such challenged locations. A DTN field trial conducted in 2015 in rural South Africa is examined to evaluate DTN architectures to best enable content distribution in areas where affordable communication channels are not fully available. The use-case in the trial was the support of micro-entrepreneurs that had been given access to simple cinema-in-a-backpack kits (battery, mobile projector and WLAN connection, plus software) that opportunistically connect to a DTN in the area. The network enabled the micro-entrepreneurs to order, receive, and screen movies at locations in under-served regions and in addition to invent and to execute micro-business activities around the screenings. The digital content was distributed to the micro-entrepreneurs by means of a DTN network with mobile infostations (wireless DTN-enabled devices) mounted on public transportation vehicles (commuter buses). In this paper, we present a six-month long field deployment that was organized in partnership with local institutions. We discuss the technical implications and make recommendations to support a socio-economic development in the under-served regions of rural South Africa.