Educational Content Delivery utilizing Opportunistic Networking over Mobile Devices

Abstract

Basic education for all should be the top priority in the global education field. However, around the world, there still exist communities in which education is a luxury they barely have access to. The rise of online education platforms coupled with the advancements in mobile technology could have the potential to bridge that gap. Yet, many of the current mobile educational solutions either do not utilize the full potential of mobile capabilities or depend on fixed networking infrastructure being present to operate, which many of the communities in question lack of. Rather than waiting for infrastructure to become available, we propose a mechanism of utilizing an inherent but underutilized capability of mobile devices – Opportunistic Networking – coupled with the small-world property of a social network, with a content format designed specifically to maximize the opportunistic delivery of educational content, as a means of dispersing of educational content in underprivileged communities. The evaluation of our approach has shown that it can achieve high delivery ratios with request latencies comparable to traditional client-server communications. The simulations also show that our approach is highly scalable in achieving the performance of a large-scale LMS installation while maintaining acceptable data disperse speeds.