Paper Info
Title
Raabta: low-cost video conferencing for the developing world
Abstract
We present Raabta, a video conferencing system for the developing world, which is designed specifically to cater to the technological, social, and economic condition of its target audience. Specifically, to minimize the cost and the energy footprint of the system, it uses the existing analog cable TV network as a communication substrate to connect Raspberry Pi end-hosts. The network stack is designed to operate over a largely unmodified broadcast-based coaxial network. The architecture is completely decentralized and can scale to hundreds of concurrent connections without requiring any backbone connectivity. To make smart use of the existing bandwidth, the video conferencing application uses multi-layered encoding and dynamically switches between selective retransmission and forward error correction based on the loss rate. Finally, the text-free user interface is simple enough to be used by low-literate users. To enable wider Internet connectivity, the architecture can easily be augmented using existing backbone technologies. While designed for direct communication between individuals, we also discuss how the same system can be used to enable community-based telemedicine and distance learning, among other applications.
Year
DOI
Venue
2013
10.1145/2502880.2502886
LCDNet@MobiCom
Keywords
Field
DocType
video conferencing application,broadcast-based coaxial network,low-cost video,existing backbone technology,existing analog cable tv,wider internet connectivity,backbone connectivity,existing bandwidth,direct communication,communication substrate,video conferencing system,video conferencing,developing world
Broadcasting,Computer science,Retransmission,Computer network,Bandwidth (signal processing),User interface,Videoconferencing,Internet access,Protocol stack,Encoding (memory)
Conference
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
0
0.34
17
Authors
1
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Zubair Nabi1235.77