Africa 3: A continental network model to enable the African fourth industrial revolution
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Date
2020
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
IEEE
Abstract
It is widely recognised that collaboration can help fast-track the development of countries
in Africa. Leveraging on the fourth industrial revolution, Africa can achieve accelerated development in
health care services, educational systems and socio-economic infrastructures. While a number of conceptual
frameworks have been proposed for the African continent, many have discounted the Cloud infrastructure
used for data storage and processing as well as the underlying network infrastructure upon which such
frameworks would be built. This work therefore presents a continental network model for interconnecting
nations in Africa through its data centres. The proposed model is based on a multilayer network engineering
approach, which first groups African countries into clusters of data centers using a hybrid combination
of clustering techniques; then utilizes Ant Colony Optimisation with Stench Pheromone, that is modified
to support variable evaporation rates, to find ideal network path(s) across the clusters and the continent
as a whole. The proposed model takes into consideration the geo-spatial location, population sizes, data
centre counts and intercontinental submarine cable landings of each African country, when clustering and
routing. For bench-marking purposes, the path selection algorithm was tested on both the obtained clusters
and African Union’s regional clusters.
Description
Keywords
Africa, Ant colony optimization, Clustering algorithms, Communication networks, Computer networks, Fourth Industrial Revolution
Citation
Ajayi, O. O. et al. (2020). Africa 3: A continental network model to enable the African fourth industrial revolution. IEEE Access, 8, 20140127, 196847-196864. 10.1109/ACCESS.2020.3034144