Communal Network Architecture for Sharing High Bandwidth Services

Abstract

This paper presents a network architecture for provisioning communal Internet access services to residential customers. The advantages of adopting the proposed architecture are enumerated both for Internet Service Providers (ISP) and residential clients. The paper presents also the CommGate, a gateway specially developed for managing the network traffic through multiple communal accesses, . Tests were carried out simulating several community scenarios with different number of customers and generating different traffic loads. The results allow us to conclude about the performance of the CommGate and the benefits of the proposed architecture.