Practical Incentive Techniques for Wireless Community Networks

In metropolitan areas, public infrastructures for high-speed wireless networking can be built through the private contributions of individual “micro-operators” who use their Internet-connected Wireless LANs (WLANs) to forward foreign traffic from and to nearby low-mobility clients. We have designed a practical WLAN aggregation scheme that (1) assumes that micro-operators are selfish and do not trust each other and uses a secure incentive technique to encourage their contribution; (2) protects the real-world identities of micro-operators and clients by relying only on disposable opaque identifiers (public keys); (3) is fully distributed, open to all, and does not rely on any authority to resolve disputes or to control membership; (4) is automated, using standard hardware and software we developed for some of the main available platforms (Linux-based WLAN access points and Windows Mobile-based cell phones).