Corey E. Baker, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
University of Southern California
Assessing a Synergistic Use of Alternate Broadband Delivery Models in Rural Areas
BibTeX
Access to broadband services is an important component in fostering the overall development of communities. However, some rural communities lack access to such services. To bridge this gap, various rural areas have adopted different kinds of alternate connectivity models. Such models attempt to mitigate the effect of the access gap on Internet-challenged rural areas. This work explores the synergistic use of such models by creating a theoretical framework for analyzing its benefits in predictable scenarios. More specifically, this work investigates a method of routing time-dependent data in quasi-deterministic delay tolerant networks that co-exist with communal access points within challenged rural environments. We formulate the problem as a maximum unsplittable multicommodity flow problem and propose an approximation algorithm that performs close to optimal.