Client-side routing-agnostic gateway selection for heterogeneous Wireless Mesh Networks

Abstract

Abstract-Citizens develop Wireless Mesh Networks (WMN) in many areas as an alternative or their only way for local interconnection and access to the Internet. This access is often achieved through the use of several shared web proxy gateways. These network infrastructures consist of heterogeneous technologies and combine diverse routing protocols. Network-aware stateof-art proxy selection schemes for WMNs do not work in this heterogeneous environment. We developed a client-side gateway selection mechanism that optimizes the client-gateway selection, agnostic to underlying infrastructure and protocols, requiring no modification of proxies nor the underlying network. The choice is sensitive to network congestion and proxy load, without requiring a minimum number of participating nodes. Extended Vivaldi network coordinates are used to estimate client-proxy network performance. The load of each proxy is estimated passively by collecting the Time-to-First-Byte of HTTP requests, and shared across clients. Our proposal was evaluated experimentally with clients and proxies deployed in guifi.net, the largest community wireless network in the world. Our selection mechanism avoids proxies with heavy load and slow internal network paths, with overhead linear to the number of clients and proxies.

Sense-Share: A Framework for Resilient Collaborative Service Performance Monitoring

“…Such a scenario is typical for ad-hoc networks, IoT networks and community networks. Previous works [3], [4], [9], [13], [14] have demonstrated that in order to receive the best Quality of Service in a large scale dynamic network, client nodes need to have knowledge of the real-time gateway node performances.…”

“…The authors of [14] introduce an additional post-processing step where clients adjust measurements received from the cluster head by an estimation of the difference between them and the head. Nonclustering based collaborative algorithms [3], [23] introduce extensive gossiping and measurement overhead to provide accurate sensing. Despite providing accurate measurements, the cost of data exchange between the network nodes are high due to frequent measurements and a wide range of collaboration within network nodes.…”

The RIMO Gateway Selection Approach for Mesh Networks: Towards a Global Internet Access for All

“…However, in a limited resource network, it is often prohibitive to introduce an additional processing overhead in central or in gateway nodes. On the other hand, decentralized gateway selection algorithms require strict cooperation, scheduling and organization between network nodes, often associated to a large amount of communication interchanges between the nodes involved [10].…”

“…To achieve a low monitoring overhead, some works use collaborative probing [8][9][10]. In [8], the monitoring modules collect statistics about network usage.…”

Design trade-offs of crowdsourced web access in community networks

“…The providers of these Internet connections can be quite diverse, such as commercial ISP, cooperatives or associations of users sharing costs [15], content or service providers promoting their offer [16], citizens sharing their unused Internet access capacity with neighbors and friends [17], public or private organizations sponsoring Internet access for complimentary interests. However, telecom regulation authorities in many countries limit publicly subsidized Internet access to preserve market competition.…”