Architecting Citywide Ubiquitous Wi-Fi Access

Cities around the world are currently considering building expensive Wi-Fi infrastructure. In urban areas, resident operated Wi-Fi access points (APs) are dense enough to achieve ubiquitous Internet access, provided we can induce the hosts to provide guest Wi-Fi access. However, sharing Wi-Fi involves taking on responsibility for the guest’s actions. Our main contribution is a novel mechanism to handoff the host’s responsibility to a trusted point by tunneling the guest’s packets through it. The tunnel also guarantees that the guest’s traffic cannot be subverted by malicious hosts. Using tunneling as a primitive, we show how to architect a citywide cooperative for safely sharing Wi-Fi with legitimate guests. We offer this as an economically viable alternative to investing millions in new infrastructure.