[olsr-dev] neighbors to pool their wireless Internet access

Sat Apr 29 17:59:15 CEST 2006

Residential Wi-Fi Sharing Made Easy:

New technology enables neighbors to pool their wireless Internet access,
without privacy or security concerns.

Researchers have developed technology designed to enable neighbors to pool
their Wi-Fi Internet access to deliver better performance and exploit
bandwidth that would otherwise sit idle.		

Haiyun Luo, an assistant professor of computer science at the University of
Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, says that the technology he created with
graduate student Nathanael Thompson would encourage people to share their
bandwidth without having to worry about security or privacy issues.

The 1MB Practical End-host collaborative Residential Multihoming (PERM)
software file is available for download and can be used by users who have
subscriptions for broadband connections, says Luo, who leads the Systems,
Wireless, and Networking Group at the university. The PERM Project site
describes the technology as having been implemented on Linux clients and
with Linksys wireless routers.

Luo says he plans to discuss the technology, which has been in the works for
two years and funded by the school, with ISPs. He says the technology
presents "a great opportunity" for them in that more people will be
encouraged to subscribe for services if the services are more flexible and
perform better.

ISPs have attempted to restrict certain uses of their broadband services,
such as by discouraging freeloaders from accessing the Internet via
unsecured Wi-Fi routers, but acknowledge it is difficult for them to
actually monitor such abuse.

PERM uses flow-scheduling algorithms to choose the best connection available
and gives subscribers priority when it comes to their own Internet
connections. The software also alerts subscribers if their connection is
being misused.

The peer-to-peer technology is initially restricted to use by people in
their homes, but Luo is interested in extending the technology, say, to
users in cars and homes.

The project was presented this week at the IEEE's INFOCOM conference in
Barcelona, Spain.

PERM is the Practical End-host collaborative Residential Multihoming
framework. 802.11 networks have spread rapidly in the residential area, and
it is common for neighbors to receive signals from each other's home
wireless networks. PERM allows residents to leverage such an opportunity to
improve their last-mile Internet connectivity, at no additional cost, by
pooling their Internet accesses together. PERM is practical in that it does
not rely on support from the network infrastructure in terms of advanced
naming scheme or proxy, the remote host in terms of new transport protocols,
or the end-user in terms of explicit application feedback or configuration.
Instead, PERM employs automated on-line analysis of the user's networking
behaviors, and exploits the identified patterns to achieve high-performance
scheduling at the flow level. PERM is also highly usable for normal
residential users. It preserves a user's privacy and security, and mitigates
the free-riding problem. We have implemented PERM for Linux clients and the
open-source Linksys wireless router. 

This site is the homepage for the PERM project. The PERM software can be
downloaded in the form of customized binaries on the download page.
Technical papers related to PERM are listed under publications. If you have
any questions please feel free to contact anyone listed under people.

Bob Brown, Network World

http://www-faculty.cs.uiuc.edu/~haiyun/
http://swing.cs.uiuc.edu/projects/perm/
http://www.ieee-infocom.org/
http://www.nwfusion.com/

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