Informatics Seminar (Perspective in Informatics 4B) 2011 - 2012
December 15 (Thu), 14:45 - 16:15
- Place:
Lecture Hall 1, Faculty of Engineering Bldg. No.10, Main Campus
- Title:
Digital Isolation in the Developed World: Extending Internet
Innovation to Rural and Mountain Communities
- Speaker:
Mike P. Wittie (Montana State University)
- Abstract:
Increasingly, full participation in modern society requires access to
communication services like Twitter, Skype, and even online games,
such as World of Warcraft. Future versions of such services will rely
heavily on interactive communication streams, including voice, video,
and control traffic, as part of their functionality. Unfortunately,
the existing designs of application infrastructure struggle to deliver
low-latency services users enjoy, gradually isolating rural
communities from the modern society.
While the reach of the Internet has grown dramatically in recent
decades, the delivered quality of online services has significant
geographic variation. To benefit from the economies of scale, services
are instantiated on large datacenters often quite distant from rural
users. Physical separation, made worse by indirect Internet routes,
introduces significant delays to rural users’ packets that impairs
interactive service usability.
Without rethinking how interactive services are delivered, the
indiscriminate infrastructure expansion along existing designs cannot
reduce such distance-induced delays. Unless the problem of latency
disparity is addressed, the future will see the expansion of
interactive communications to new types of services that will be
available only to a dwindling percentage of well-connected urban
users.
In this talk I will present my research vision and recent results
towards improving access to interactive services in rural and mountain
communities.
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