Advances in wireless community networks with the community-lab testbed

Abstract

Abstract:Beyond traditional telecom providers, citizens and organizations pool their own resources and coordinate in order to build local network infrastructures to address the digital divide in many parts of the world. These crowdsourced network infrastructures can be self-organized and shared by a community for the collective benefit of its members. Several of these networks have developed open, free, and neutral agreements, and are governed as a common-pool resource: Community networks. These are built using a variety of commodity wireless hardware (e.g. Wi-Fi long range point to point links, WiFi and GSM access points, and mesh networks), sometimes optical fibre links, heterogeneous nodes, routing protocols and applications. A group of researchers, developers and community networks developed the CommunityLab testbed, and for the last five years have worked together to overcome obstacles, improve the technologies, tools and operational models being used, as well as model best practices for more effective and sustainable community networks. This article presents the challenges for experimentation, the testbeds built, results, lessons learned and the impact of that work to place wireless community networks as one sustainable way towards an Internet accessible to All.

Client-side routing-agnostic gateway selection for heterogeneous Wireless Mesh Networks

“…According to the challenges that Vivaldi [17] faces by design, a network coordinates system should produce a minimal amount of overhead traffic when probing. The overhead network traffic generated by Vivaldi is, in bytes per second: overhead vivaldi = (2 * ping size * ping freq + data) * n (8) data vivaldi = (n p * 160 + n n * 160 + 10)/round period (9) ping freq = round pings /round period (10) In the formulas above, n represents the number of nodes in the Vivaldi system and n n and p n are the maximum number of known neighbors and proxies, respectively. We can see that the overhead of Vivaldi increases linearly with the amount of participants.…”

“…The metrics and the client selection mechanism were instantiated in guifi.net using the Community-Lab.net [10] infrastructure. In this mechanism, nodes are acting as clients interacting with a set of guifi.net web proxies.…”

OPPay: Design and Implementation of a Payment System for Opportunistic Data Services

“…In the recent years, companies such as Fon [17] have successfully attracted large number of participants in the WiFi sharing scheme (or wireless community network [6]) where users share wireless bandwidth. However, such scheme either requires participants to buy specialized routers or apply firmware modifications to existing routers.…”

“…1) WiFi sharing [6], [7], [8], where WiFi owners share their wireless bandwidth to others. 2) Content-based file sharing [9], [10], [11], which enables file sharing via short range communication radios.…”

Toward Access Equality: Bridging the Digital Divide

“…These networks are collectively owned and run by local citizens and/or organizations for the benefit of their respective communities. They are built using commodity wireless hardware (mostly Wi-Fi based), locally-funded fiber links, heterogeneous architectures, and utilizing the open unlicensed spectrum [8]. Despite the fact that some State laws are not friendly to these networks, about three million people have access to the Internet through community networks in the US alone.…”