Internet media upload caching for poorly-connected regions

Abstract

Media uploads and downloads, even those on the order of a few hundred kilobytes, commonly fail when attempted over lossy, low-bandwidth, and high latency connections. These conditions, which are common for networks in rural, resource-poor areas, result in the inability for residents of these areas to fully participate in the modern Internet. We study traffic traces collected from two networks and find high locality of interest as well as poor performance for Internet media. We also find that users often abort uploads due to network performance. Given that media content produced by local users is often heavily consumed by local users, we propose VillageCache, a system which allows for appropriate local transformation and redistribution of media uploaded through an Internet cache. We build VillageCache and find it successfully delivers cached media, providing an orders of magnitude improvement in file transfer performance, bandwidth reduction, and the virtual elimination of video stalls in the face of poor network connectivity. Caches with upload capabilities placed at the edge of poorly-connected networks will enable users to produce and consume media-rich content while mitigating the constraints present in under-resourced networks.