On Profitability and Efficiency of Wireless Mesh Networks

Abstract

The convenience of wireless networking and lightweight handheld devices has led to a large-scale adoption of wireless technologies. Corporations, universities, hospitals, homes, and public places are deploying these networks at a remarkable rate. In a wireless mesh network, a few Internet transmit access points (ITAPs), serving as gateways to the Internet, are deployed across the neighborhood. Wireless nodes (e.g., houses) are equipped with low-cost antennas, and serve as routers to send traffic for both itself and its neighbors. In this way, a multihop wireless network is formed among wireless nodes to cooperatively route traffic to the Internet through the ITAPs. Such a multihop structure dramatically reduces the number of ITAPs, which is a major cost in deployment. The promise of wireless mesh networks has attracted lots of research work in the area, ranging from designing MAC protocols to developing routing protocols and routing metrics, to studying interactions with TCP, to controlling topology via power control, channel assignment, and directional antennas. In addition to network technologies, another major factor that determines the success of wireless mesh networks is whether there exist viable business models. There is limited research on this problem. In wireless mesh networks, wireless nodes are required to forward traffic for both itself and its neighbors. If the nodes are controlled by self-interested users, they may not efficiently share their capacity to route traffic for other nodes. Such possibility undermines the performance and feasibility of wireless mesh networks. Therefore effective pricing mechanisms need to be developed before the mesh technologies are commercialized. Motivated by the observations, we develop two pricing mechanisms for non-cooperative wireless mesh networks: a centralized pricing mechanism and a decentralized one. In the centralized pricing mechanism, the service provider needs to monitor and price the traffic originated from every node, while the decentralized scheme leaves the traffic monitoring and pricing to each router. We describe algorithms a service provider uses to efficiently place the ITAPs, and determine the prices. We evaluate the profitability and overall efficiency of the wireless mesh network under the centralized and decentralized pricing mechanisms. As a comparison, we also analyze an alternative structure based on a single-hop wireless network. In such a network, each user can directly communicate with an ITAP, and does not rely on other users for its communication. On the other hand, the singlehop wireless network requires more Internet access points to be deployed, thereby increasing the infrastructure cost. Our analysis has important practical implications to wireless service providers and the future of wireless mesh technologies.

Keywords: Wireless Mesh Network, Pricing Mechanism, Business Model