SWAP: Shared Wireless Access Protocol (using Reciprocity)

Abstract

Wireless access points are becoming more and more prominent in the home, yet there is no incentive to encourage access point owners to share their service. We introduce SWAP, a lightweight protocol that uses reciprocity to motivate users to share service. Each node participating in SWAP stores perishable receipts that are used to calculate a user's rating (how much the user shares his or her access point). SWAP does not use a centralized authority to store or validate receipts nor does it place an excessive burden on peers. SWAP is also robust against collusion, which we show through analysis and implementation. As demonstrated by an implementation of the most computationally expensive portions of the protocol, SWAP imposes little overhead even on mobile devices.