Currently, Internet service is very limited in some large outdoor areas, such as U.S. national parks, which are not covered by either Internet or cellular. However, in such areas, there are quite many emerging demands for accessing contents online. For example, people may need to obtain the map information about the park, or they may want to post their very fresh photo on Facebook, Instagram or other online social network sites. In this project, we first develop a few wifi routers and deploy them in popular areas such as sightseeing points, camping areas and hotels. In particular, these routers are equipped with a relatively large size of storage which could be used to cache some popular contents, such as news, twits, photos or even movies. Among these routers, the one that locates at the main entrance of the park may have the ability to access global Internet, while the others are not physically interconnected but siting separately in different locations. In order to connect these isolated routers, we need to develop an Android or iOS App that can be run on user’s smart phone and serve as the relay to convey Interest and Data between these routers. Note that the mentioned Android App is able to open some free space (e.g., a few hundred megabytes) for caching Interest and Data under the agreement signed by the App user and the WiFi service. With these required infrastructure and application, the consumer that install this App may have the ability to access Internet service such as read/write emails, post photos or even downloading movies. For example, when a consumer wants to read the New York Times news in the camping area, an Interest message will be forwarded to the nearby router. If the news has already been cached in the router, it will be directly replied to the consumer; otherwise, the router will first cache the Interest and then distribute it to other relay users. The relay users can carry the Interest to another location where another router may have the news. In this case, the router that has the news can forward the data to another relay user that heading towards the camping area. Finally, the relay user can carry the news back to the router in the camping area and the consumer can get the news by initiating the Interest again. During this process, if none of the router in the park has the news information, the Interest may need to be forwarded to the entrance router that has access to the Internet.

Team Lead:

Architecture lead: 

Customer interaction lead:

Documentation lead: 

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QA lead:

UX lead: