Africa 3: A Continental Network Model to Enable the African Fourth Industrial Revolution

TL;DR

This paper proposes a comprehensive continental network model for Africa, integrating data centers and optimized routing to support the continent's development through the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

Contribution

It introduces a multilayer network model using hybrid clustering and modified Ant Colony Optimization tailored for Africa's unique geo-spatial and infrastructural features.

Findings

Effective clustering of African countries based on multiple factors

Optimized network paths across Africa and within regional clusters

Model supports enhanced data connectivity for development

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 centres using a hybrid combination of clustering techniques; then utilizes Ant Colony Optimization with Stench Pheromone, that is modified to support variable evaporation rates, to find the ideal network path(s) across the clusters and the continent as a whole. The propsoed 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.