Cost Sharing in Social Community Networks

Wireless social community networks (WSCNs) is an emerging technology that operate in the unlicensed spectrum and have been created as an alternative to cellular wireless networks for providing low-cost, high speed wireless data access in urban areas. WSCNs is an upcoming idea that is starting to gain attention amongst the civilian Internet users. By using special WiFi routers that are provided by a social community network provider (SCNP), users can effectively share their connection with the neighborhood in return for some monthly monetary benefits. However, deployment maps of existing WSCNs reflect their slow progress in capturing the WiFi router market. In this paper, we look at a router design and cost sharing problem in WSCNs to improve deployment. We devise a simple to implement, successful, budget-balanced, ex-post efficient, and individually rational auction-based mechanism that generates the optimal number of features a router should have and allocates costs to residential users in proportion to the feature benefits they receive. Our problem is important to a new-entrant SCNP when it wants to design its multi-feature routers with the goal to popularize them and increase their deployment in a residential locality. Our proposed mechanism accounts for heterogeneous user preferences towards different router features and comes up with the optimal (feature-set, user costs) router blueprint that satisfies each user in a locality, in turn motivating them to buy routers and thereby improve deployment.