A sustainable connectivity model of the Internet access technologies in rural and low-income areas

The Internet has evolved as a critical booster for the economic, social and technical development of human society. Almost half of the world’s population is unfortunately missing out due to the lack of access to the Internet. Such users are mainly those living in rural and low-income areas. Various strategies and approaches for improving the Internet’s accessibility are available, each with a different set of benefits, costs, and risks. It is important to choose solutions from these feasible options that promise to promote the efficiency as well as the sustainability of the ‘Internet Ecosystem’. In this paper, we propose a new model of sustainable connectivity that integrates three factors (affordability, social shareability, and geographical network coverage) that must be considered in the selection and design of Internet access solutions. In addition, we develop a hypergraph-based network graph solution that illustrates the relationship among the three factors. Then, we use Coloured Petri Nets (CPNs) to model and simulate the possible Internet access solutions and also interplay those three factors to study how they impact the overall network connectivity performance. Our initial results have revealed how sustainable Internet connectivity behaves as a function of the affordability, social interaction, and geographical network coverage and investigates how these factors could be leveraged to provide different network connectivity and Internet access solutions. © ICST Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering 2018.