MetroSim: a planning tool for metropolitan WiFi networks

Massive growth of home wireless networking revives the opportunity to achieve citywide ubiquitous wireless access by building a WiFi overlay based on the principle of broadband sharing. This kind of large-scale overlay network poses new challenges for wireless network planning. In this scenario, the number of possible locations to install public hotspots is larger, by order of magnitude, to those managed by existing WiFi planning tools. Moreover, dynamics due to a loose control on the WiFi hotspots (as routers are not 100% controlled by the operator, but by the router owner) means hard constraints on the flexibility of the deployment. This paper describes MetroSim: a novel planning tool to drive the deployment of metropolitan WiFi networks based on enabling safe and controlled broadband sharing. MetroSim considers the aforementioned challenges in its design and implementation, as it has been developed specially to help planning this type large-scale metropolitan WiFi overlay networks.