OLPC Idea Pool

Software Idea - Peer To Peer Distribution Of Electronic Text

I believe one of the most useful purposes of the laptop will be to distribute electronic text (i.e. e-books). The distribution of any information without a persistent network connection will be difficult. I imagine a situation where 1 out of 100 or 1000 kids may have access to a network connection. The peer to peer network could be used to distribute e-books from that single network connection to 1000 kids. I'd like to propose the design of a peer-to-peer network client designed specifically for this purpose.

A simple, graphical language-localized client would be designed to present a catalog of e-books. The client would pull down a listing of books available in a certain age-range for a targeted language. The student would pick texts that he or she has interest in. This list of requests would consist of a very small packet of data, perhaps a unique identifier of the device and a unique identifier of the text. When the device sees another device, it would off load it's packet to the peer device and vice-versa. Each device would contain a listing of requests from all of the peers that it came in contact with. The next time a device connects to the Internet, it would pull as many texts as allowable by pre-defined memory limits (say 3-5 meg). As the device comes into contact with other devices, it would deliver the texts to the other devices. Hopefully, over time, the requestor would be delivered some of the texts originally requested. As each text is delivered, a delivery or cancellation notice would be sent back through the peer network.

The peer to peer network should gather performance intelligence over time. It should be able to guess which routes have better chances of making a request and returning a delivery.

If a proof of concept proves to work well, the peer to peer network would be extended to handle two-way communication for interaction such as email or the submission and grading of assignments.

--65.7.133.163 04:41, 27 January 2006 (EST) Jason Hoekstra - jason@solexinc.com

Wireless Networking

A book called Wireless Networking in the Developing World is now available on the net in pdf at http://wndw.net/. It has a lot of information that might be useful when deploying the OLPC program. In addition to covering WIFI theory and design, it covers practical, social, and economic problems that they encountered. One idea is to share the cost of the infrastructure with other local groups like businesses and local government. Another is to disperse the knowledge of how to operate the system so that if one person moves away, critical knowledge isn't lost.