2011/01/01 by Jon Crowcroft, James Kempf, Crowcroft, Jon +4
Computer Science · #Cooperation incentives #Cooperative networking #Internet architectures #Peer-to-Peer Network Technologies #Recommender Systems and Techniques #Semantic Web and Ontologies #Social and mobility modeling Information-centric operation #User-provided wireless networks
paper · doi:10.4230/dagsemproc.10372.1
openalex publication_date 2011/01/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
In the latest years the highly nomadic lifestyles that Internet users experience, and the strong entanglement between society and technology, lead to the appearance of community networks where the end-user has, most of the times, an active role in terms of sharing Internet access. Such networks range from basic functionality, such as the ability to create a wireless (ad-hoc) network on-the-fly with a simple PC (e.g., Internet Connection Sharing functionality from Microsoft), or more elaborate cases of commercial success, e.g. FON. Wireless networks provided by end-users are expected to grow, despite the limitations imposed by traditional operator-centric Internet communication models. In this new scenario the end-user (or a community of end-users) is a micro-operator in the sense that he/she shares his/her subscribed broadband Internet access based on some incentive scheme. Besides Internet access sharing, being a micro-operator also means providing other network functionality, such as local mobility management and store-cache-forward mechanisms, based on the right set of incentives as well as on adequate information concerning the way people interact and move.