A Hybrid Overlay Network for Bulk Data in Challenged Networks

Developing countries face significant challenges in network access, making even simple network tasks unpleasant. Transferring bulk data in these networks is often prohibitively difficult, rendering useful information out of reach for many people. This paper introduces phoretic networking, an approach for orchestrating bulk data transfer through a series of hosts with spare storage and diverse network connectivity. By combining natural individual mobility and available network connectivity, phoretic networking forms a hybrid overlay network for delivering bulk data while preserving scalability in the state required to do so. Our implementation of a phoretic network, Bati, outperforms earlier attempts in using mobility for data delivery and in-network storage for enhanced path selection. Our evaluation demonstrates substantial savings in using Bati for delivering bulk data, transferring an order of magnitude more data than the network alone, and improving the delivery rate by more than 40% compared to popular ad-hoc networks.