Peer-to-Peer Wireless LAN Consortia: Economic Modeling and Architecture

In this paper we explore the incentive and architectural issues that arise in Consortia of Peer-to-Peer Wireless Local Area Networks. A P2P WLAN Consortium (PWC) is a community of WLAN Administrative Domains (ADs) that offer network access to each other’s registered users. The great benefit of ubiquitous access that these roaming members enjoy compensates for their AD’s cost of providing access to visitors. Existing roaming schemes utilize central authorities or bilateral contracts to control the parties’ behavior. In contrast, a PWC forms a P2P community in which participating ADs are autonomous entities. They make independent decisions concerning the amount of resources (e.g. access bandwidth) they contribute. As a result, similarly to existing P2P systems, a PWC will suffer from abusive behavior (free riding) if no incentive mechanisms exist to ensure that ADs offer the amount of resources that is economically justified. We explore the use of flexible rules on reciprocity to guide domain policies. We develop a suitable economic model and derive rules that would bring the system to a near-optimum equilibrium by forcing peers to contribute in order to consume. We then discuss certain key implementation issues related to the selection of critical parameters and rules enforcement in such a distributed environment.