Advances in wireless community networks with the community-lab testbed

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 communit...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:IEEE communications magazine 2016-07, Vol.54 (7), p.20-27
Main Authors: Navarro, Leandro, Vinas, Roger Baig, Barz, Christoph, Bonicioli, Joseph, Braem, Bart, Freitag, Felix, Vilata-i-Balaguer, Ivan
Format: Magazinearticle
Language:English
Subjects:
Arquitectura de computadors
Biological system modeling
Cellular radio
Communities
Community networks
Comunicacions òptiques
Comunicació sense fil, Sistemes de
Construction
Informàtica
Infrastructure
Internet
Links
Networks
Obstacles
Optical communications
Optical fibre communication
Peer-to-peer computing
Radio links
Routing
Routing protocols
Sustainability
Telecommunications
Wireless channels
Wireless communication
Wireless communications systems
Wireless LAN
Wireless networks
Àrees temàtiques de la UPC
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Summary: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, Wi-Fi and GSM access points, and mesh networks), sometimes optical fiber links, heterogeneous nodes, routing protocols, and applications. A group of researchers, developers, and community networks developed the Community-Lab 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 toward an Internet accessible to all.
ISSN:0163-6804
1558-1896
DOI:10.1109/MCOM.2016.7509374