The Case for Peer-to-Peer Wireless LAN Consortia

We make the case for Consortia of Peer-to-Peer (P2P) Wireless Local Area Networks (WLAN). A P2P WLAN Consortium (PWC) is a community of WLAN Administrative Domains (ADs) that offer network access to each other's registered users. The ubiquitous network access that these roaming members of an AD enjoy can compensate for their AD's cost of providing access to visitors. Existing WLAN roaming schemes utilize central authorities or bilateral contracts to control access to resources. In contrast, a PWC forms a P2P community in which participating ADs are autonomous entities. ADs 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. Flexible rules on reciprocity can be set to delimit domain policies in order to bring the system to a near-optimum equilibrium, by forcing peers to contribute in order to consume. In addition to making the case for PWC, in this paper we discuss a number of technologies and issues related to the implementation of PWC such as rule design, security and differentiated QoS in such a distributed environment.