Less-than-best-effort service for Community Wireless Networks: Challenges at three layers

Abstract

Community Wireless Networks can be a way to make “Internet access for everyone” possible, by sharing a broadband Internet connection via WLAN. The underlying idea is to freely provide network access to anybody in the vicinity of the wireless access point via a Lower-than-Best-Effort (LBE) service, such that non-paying users interfere as little as possible with the “regular” Internet usage. Such a service faces challenges at various network layers; this paper discusses some of them, focusing on layers 2, 3 and 4.