Designing an extensible communication platform for rural area

Rural digital connectivity in developing nations have failed to sustain themselves after subsidy is removed. The demography of users does not demand Internet connectivity for majority of their communication needs. This work proposes an extensible platform for rural communication utilizing delay tolerant networks. The platform allows quick development of localized applications for day to day communication needs. Using data driven paradigm the solution simplifies and abstracts the client and server implementations for the applications. For more intensive applications, the platform allows modular expansion on both the client and server pieces of applications. To prove the extensibility and operational efficiency, the authors present the design of multiple end user scenarios, targeting multimedia application for remote farm monitoring, video rental and another scenario for conducting online evaluations for school tests. The key contributions of the proposal are - operational sustainability of platform, ease of application development for simple communication needs, ability to handle complicated scenarios like processing high definition multimedia content over disconnected networks.