The Tennessee Cache Box Project
Micah Beck, Joe
Kirby, Terry Moore, Donia
Nance, Melissa Wauford
University of Tennessee, Knoxville
The principal goal of the Tennessee Cache Box project is to dramatically
improve the quality of Web access for our partner schools and libraries
which have very limited connections to the Internet. The project will utilize
a powerful but easy to manage system which automatically delivers the Web
content of most interest to these organizations and stores it on an inexpensive
device (called the Tennessee Cache Box) attached to their local area network.
Successful completion of the project will result in the rapid dissemination
of a technology which would significantly enhance the value of the web
for underserved community organizations across the country.
Project Problem Statement. For many people in our community the
distance between the promised value of the Internet, as an infrastructure
for education and public benefit, and its actual value is still wide and
shows no signs of narrowing soon. Schools, libraries, and other community
service providers in our region want and need to use the Internet to deliver
multimedia and interactive content to the people they serve, but they cannot
afford more than a rudimentary connection. Even organizations that are
able to make higher recurring expenditures for connection charges are increasingly
hampered by congestion on the Internet backbone and overloaded servers
at the sites they want to reach. To ask fifth graders to repeatedly wait
more than 20 or 30 seconds while the pages they want load across the network
is unrealistic, and unfortunately much of the most effective educational
content makes the heavy use of multimedia (e.g. video, audio, etc.) and
interactive programming (e.g. using Java), which exacerbates the situation.
Our schools, libraries, and community service organizations are spending
significant resources on building up their internal networks in the expectation
that this will enable them to easily spread the benefits of Internet connectivity
to the people they serve. But as the factors above show, this expectation
is likely to be frustrated for some time to come. The problem is that affordable
recurring costs for external network connectivity will not buy enough bandwidth
to provide the immediacy, interactivity, or media richness that people
have come demand. The educational value of the Internet will remain an
unfulfilled dream for the many people in our region, and in many similar
areas around the country, until this problem is addressed.
Project Solution to the Problem. The solution we propose is to provide
our partner organizations with a service which automatically delivers the
Web content of most interest to them and stores it on a device attached
to their local area network. Once this content is stored locally, multimedia
rich web sites become accessible at faster local area network speeds, and
this happens without in any way changing the underlying Web paradigm. Our
service has two components, one technical, and the other organizational.
The technical component of our solution centers around the Tennessee Cache
Box (TnCB), a special purpose, low cost computer system that is optimized
to implement our strategy of maximizing the use of limited connectivity
through the intelligent use of local storage. The organizational component
consists of an ongoing collaboration on the part of UTK's colleges and
library to build a new kind of content which is geared to the needs of
our community partners and which draws together in a dynamic way the best
educational and information content on the Internet. Measurable Outcomes
of the Project. The initial beneficiaries of this project will be 4,200
school children in rural and underserved Tennessee counties who will see
the Internet come alive with all the multimedia richness and interactivity
that only university communities and major corporations experience today.
The success of the project will be measurable in both purely technical
terms (e.g. as revealed increasing number of large, multimedia files recorded
in the TnCB logs) and through the record of teacher involvement and student
response that the ongoing use of the TnCB system will produce. Based on
initial partner reponses to this project, we expect other schools and school
systems to request TnCB's during the period of the grant. Given the power
and the limitless scalability of this inexpensive and flexible Cache Box
technology, we believe that this project will act as a proof of concept
that could launch a complete redesign of the educational use of the Web.
Technical approach. The Tennessee Cache Box is a hardware/software
system designed to implement an organization level platform for the storing
and sharing of Web content. It builds on a familiar and well-known technique
for addressing the problems of Web-site overload and network congestion,
viz. "caching." Sizes of shared or network caches vary, but the minimum
size of a TnCB cache is 10 Gigabytes. Dynamic caching by itself is inadequate
in situations when the first download of a file from the Internet is prohibitively
slow, or when browsing patterns at frequently visited sites are not repetitive.
In these cases it is useful to retrieve an entire web site in advance ("pre-fetch"
or "pre-load" the site) and store it in the cache. The TnCB has the capability
of setting aside a portion of its disk to be "statically managed," i.e.
not effected by the browsing activity of individual users but periodically
reloaded or refreshed according to a certain policy. For instance, the
entire content of selected NASA sites could be loaded into the cache overnight
and be immediately available for rapid access of students the next day.
The use of a policy-based or "static" cache takes advantage of predictable
patterns of web use in order to provide rapid access to highly desirable
or very slow loading sites. It takes advantage of the fact that the network
can always be moving the material people want near to hand without anyone
having to browse for it. A well-stocked static cache can even support profitable
browsing when the actual connection to the Internet is not available (i.e.
off-line).
Dedicated Caching Hardware. The final step taken by the TnCB is
to deliver all of this valuable caching software in a low cost, industry
standard hardware system that is configured to provide turnkey service.
TnCB's are designed for very easy set-up and administration: unbox it,
plug it into the wall socket, plug it into the network, type in a couple
of IP addresses, and it starts caching. Further administration duties are
handled remotely over the network, so that personnel at a given site need
no longer administer a TnCB once it is set up. The TnCB provides high volume
caching functionality to our partners in a plug-and-play manner.
Community Involvement Partnerships. Two school districts are directly
involved as partners in our project, providing both input in the identification
of the problem and a commitment resources to the implementation of the
projects TnCB soloution:
a) The Scott County, Tennessee Board of Education serves approximately
3,000 students who live in a rural Appalachian setting.
b) The Oneida, Tennessee Special School District enrolls approximately
1,200 students in a rural Appalachian town of approximately 5000.