2016/02/25 by Junaid Qadir, Qadir, Junaid, Arjuna Sathiaseelan +5 · 1 citation
Computer Science · #Caching and Content Delivery #FOS: Computer and information sciences #ICT in Developing Communities #Networking and Internet Architecture (cs.NI) #Opportunistic and Delay-Tolerant Networks
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1602.08135
openalex publication_date 2016/02/25 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Internet is the linchpin of modern society, which the various threads of modern life weave around. But being a part of the bigger energy-guzzling industrial economy, it is vulnerable to disruption. It is widely believed that our society is exhausting its vital resources to meet our energy requirements, and the cheap fossil fuel fiesta will soon abate as we cross the tipping point of global oil production. We will then enter the long arc of scarcity, constraints, and limits---a post-peak "long emergency" that may subsist for a long time. To avoid the collapse of the networking ecosystem in this long emergency, it is imperative that we start thinking about how networking should adapt to these adverse "undeveloping" societal conditions. We propose using the idea of "approximate networking"---which will provide good-enough networking services by employing contextually-appropriate tradeoffs---to survive, or even thrive, in the conditions of scarcity and limits.