On Demand Connectivity Sharing: Queuing management and load balancing for User-Provided Networks

We introduce the concept of “On Demand Connectivity Sharing”, which we build on top of User-Provided Networks (UPNs). UPNs were recently proposed as a new connectivity paradigm, according to which home-users share their broadband Internet connection with roaming guests. We enhance this paradigm with...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Computer networks (Amsterdam, Netherlands : 1999) Netherlands : 1999), 2011-02, Vol.55 (2), p.399-414
Main Authors: Psaras, Ioannis, Mamatas, Lefteris
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Algorithms
Broadband
Broadband networks
Connectivity
Construction
Demand
End users
Internet
Internet access
Load balancing (computing)
Marketing
Networks
On Demand Connectivity Sharing
Queues
Queuing theory
Service introduction
Studies
User-Provided Networks
Wireless communications
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:We introduce the concept of “On Demand Connectivity Sharing”, which we build on top of User-Provided Networks (UPNs). UPNs were recently proposed as a new connectivity paradigm, according to which home-users share their broadband Internet connection with roaming guests. We enhance this paradigm with incentives, rules and policies, based on which: (i) home-users provide on-demand connectivity only (i.e., they do not explicitly allocate a portion of their bandwidth) and (ii) guest-users utilize resources that remain unexploited from the respective home-users. We realize the “On Demand Connectivity Sharing” concept through (i) a queuing algorithm that classifies traffic according to its source (i.e., home- or guest-traffic) and prioritizes home- against guest-traffic accordingly and (ii) a probabilistic load-balancing algorithm that guarantees smooth cooperation between home- and guest-users. We show both analytically and through extensive performance evaluation that it is indeed possible for a home-user to share his connection with guest-, roaming-users without any practical impact on his own network performance. The concept of “On Demand Connectivity Sharing” through User-Provided Networks is expected to receive a lot of attention in the years to come, since it enables a new notion of autonomous and self-organized mobile computing. For example, we gather information regarding the location and range of real WiFi access points in the city center of London and we show that a walking user can receive acceptable services, when acting as a guest-user and gets resources from near-by home-networks.
ISSN:1389-1286
1872-7069
DOI:10.1016/j.comnet.2010.08.015