Analyzing and accelerating web access in a school in peri-urban India

While computers and Internet access have growing penetration amongst schools in the developing world, intermittent connectivity and limited bandwidth often prevent them from being fully utilized by students and teachers. In this paper, we make two contributions to help address this problem. First, we characterize six weeks of HTTP traffic from a primary school outside of Bangalore, India, illuminating opportunities and constraints for improving performance in such settings. Second, we deploy an aggressive caching and prefetching engine and show that it accelerates a user's overall browsing experience (apart from video content) by 2.8x. Our accelerator leverages innovative techniques that have been proposed, but not evaluated in detail, including the effectiveness of serving stale pages, cached page highlighting, and client-side prefetching. Unlike proxy-based techniques, our system is bundled as an open-source Firefox plugin and runs directly on client machines. This allows easy installation and configuration by end users, which is especially important in developing regions where a lack of permissions or technical expertise often prevents modification of internal network settings.