An Overview of the KioskNet System

An Overview of the KioskNet System
S. Keshav, David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science University of Waterloo
Internet kiosks can provide services such as birth and marriage certificates, land records, and medical and agricultural consulting to the poorest sections of society. To effectively serve its users and be profitable to its operator, a kiosk should be always available and have a low-cost and reliable connection to the Internet. However, kiosk computers often fail, requiring frequent and expensive repairs. Network connectivity can be lost due to failures and computer viruses. Faced with high costs and unreliable service delivery, customers lose interest and kiosk deployments become unsustainable.

KioskNet provides a platform for low-cost and reliable Internet kiosks. It provides connectivity using traditional solutions such as dialup and satellite, as well as opportunistic communication between a kiosk and a wireless router on a vehicle passing by. Computation is provided by a kiosk controller that allows recycled PCs to boot from it, and that also provides a mountable file system. The KioskNet platform supports end-to-end security, user management, and applications such as email and content distribution.

Over the last three years, a team of over 20 researchers at the University of Waterloo has designed, implemented, and field-tested KioskNet. Based on our experiences, we have continually refined the initial design, gaining both simplicity and greater ease of deployment.

In this talk, I will present an overview of the KioskNet system, outlining its software architecture. I will then focus on the changes we made to the architecture over the years. I will conclude with a description of its current status and our plans for field deployments.

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S. Keshav is an Associate Professor and Canada Research Chair in Tetherless Computing at the School of Computer Science, University of Waterloo, Canada. Earlier in his career has was a researcher at Bell Labs, an Associate Professor at Cornell, and a co-founder of Ensim Corporation, a Silicon Valley startup. He is the author of a widely used graduate textbook on computer networking and has been awarded the Director's Gold Medal at IIT Delhi, the Sakrison Prize at UC Berkeley, and the Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship. His current interests are in infrastructural issues underlying tetherless computing. Keshav received a B.Tech from the Indian Institute of Delhi in 1986 and a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1991, both in Computer Science.

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