Support Service for Reciprocal Computational Resource Sharing in Wireless Community Networks

In community networks, individuals and local organizations from a geographic area team up to create and run a community-owned IP network to satisfy the community's demand for ICT, such as facilitating Internet access and providing services of local interest. Most current community networks use wireless links for the node interconnection, applying off-the-shelf wireless equipment. While IP connectivity over the shared network infrastructure is successfully achieved, the deployment of applications in community networks is surprisingly low. To address the solution of this problem, we propose in this paper a service to incentivize the contribution of computing and storage as cloud resources to community networks, in order to stimulate the deployment of services and applications. Our final goal is the vision that in the long term, the users of community networks will not need to consume applications from the Internet, but find them within the wireless community network

Bottom-up Infrastructures: Aligning Politics and Technology in building a Wireless Community Network

Contemporary innovation in infrastructures is increasingly characterized by a close relationship between experts and lay people. This phenomenon has attracted the attention from a wide range of disciplines, including computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW), science and technology studies (S&TS), organization studies and participatory design (PD). Connecting to this broad area of research, the article presents a qualitative case study concerning the building and maintenance of a grassroots, bottom-up information infrastructure in Italy, defined as wireless community network (WCN). Methodologically, the research is based on qualitative interviews with participants to the WCN, ethnographic observations and document analysis. The aim of the article is to understand the alignment between the technical work implied in building this bottom-up infrastructure and the political and cultural frameworks that move people to participate to this project. Relying on the field of science & technology studies, and in particular on the notions of ‘inverse infrastructure’ and ‘research in the wild’, we disclose the WCN’s peculiar innovation trajectory, localized outside conventional spaces of research and development. Overall, the presentation of the qualitative and ethnographic data allows to point out a more general reflection on bottom-up infrastructures and to enrich the academic debate concerning bottom-up infrastructuring work and other similar typologies of collaborative design projects in the domain of infrastructures

Analysis of guifi.net's topology: extension of results

Report de recerca del Departament d'Arquitectura de ComputadorsThis report extends the analysis carried out in a previous work [1] about the topology of guifi.net wireless community network. The main objective is validating the topology generator proposed in [1] for guifi.net like topologies by considering a larger number of zones. The numerical results obtained in this report are in line with those obtained before, confirming the topology generator. Additionally, new results are presented, as the link ength distribution.Preprin

DIY networking as a facilitator for interdisciplinary research on the hybrid city

DIY networking is a technology with special characteristics compared to the public Internet, which holds a unique potential for empowering citizens to shape their hybrid urban space toward conviviality and collective awareness. It can also play the role of a “boundary object” for facilitating interdisciplinary interactions and participatory processes between different actors: researchers, engineers, practitioners, artists, designers, local authorities, and activists. This position paper presents a social learning framework, the DIY networking paradigm, that we aim to put in the centre of the hybrid space design process. We first introduce our individual views on the role of design as discussed in the fields of engineering, urban planning, urban interaction design, design research, and community informatics. We then introduce a simple methodology for combining these diverse perspectives into a meaningful interdisciplinary collaboration, through a series of related events with different structure and framing. We conclude with a short summary of a selection of these events, which serves also as an introduction to the CONTACT workshop on facilitating information sharing between strangers, in the context of the Hybrid City III conference

The socio-technical shaping of digital commons and the material politics of the Italian wireless community network

Digital commons represent important alternative forms of technology production and sharing in contemporary network society. The article presents the main results of a qualitative study on a specific case of digital commons, Ninux.org, the largest wireless community network (CN) in Italy. CNs are distributed local communication infrastructures, generally built and self-managed by grassroots organisations. Empirical data has been gathered through a mix of qualitative techniques, including 14 in-depth interviews with key participants of four major local networks (Pisa, Bologna, Firenze and Roma), multi-sited ethnographic observations and documents analysis, with the aim to investigate par- ticipation processes in this project, paying particular attention to the discursive elements and material practices among participants. On the basis of the empirical research and drawing on a conceptual framework matured on the ridge between sociology of innovation and science and technology studies (S&TS), the article’s findings explore the complexity characterising the interaction between practices, technology and political visions involved in digital commons production. We argue that the adherence to the paradigm of commons enacts a complex socio-technical process, in which discourses about the governance of digital resources, political agendas and material technologies are mutually adjusted and continuously realigned to perform in practice an infrastructure as a common-pool resource

Seeking togetherness: moving toward a comparative evaluation framework in an interdisciplinary DIY networking project

There is renewed interest in community networks as a mechanism for local neighbourhoods to find their voice and maintain local ownership of knowledge. In a post-Snowden, big data, age of austerity there is both widespread questioning of what happens to public generated data shared over ‘free’ services such as Facebook, and also a renewed focus on self-provisioning where there are gaps in digital service provision. In this paper we introduce an EU funded collaborative project (‘MAZI’) that is exploring how Do-It-Yourself approaches to building community networks might foster social cohesion, knowledge sharing and sustainable living through four pilots across Europe. A key challenge is to develop a shared evaluation approach that will allow us to make sense of what we are learning across highly diverse local situations and disciplinary approaches. In this paper we describe our initial approaches and the challenges we face

Evaluating Performance of Content Cache Placement in a Wireless Community Network

Community networks are often associated with bandwidth constraints. The limited bandwidth capacity in community networks results in higher content delivery time (latency) and reduces quality of service. Unplanned cache placement in the community networks has the potential to result in higher delays and increased network traffic. This study evaluates cache placement and content distribution in a community network using a distributed caching strategy. Latency, throughput and video performance measurements were carried out for geography, delay and hop count cache placement. In this study, hop count cache placement resulted in the lowest average latency, highest average throughput and best video performance. Overall, the study shows lower average latency, higher average throughput and better video performance at the caches compared to the main server. This reinforces the effectiveness of con- tent caching in improving network performance in wireless community networks

Clouds of Small Things: Provisioning Infrastructure-as-a-Service from within Community Networks

Community networks offer a shared communication infrastructure where communities of citizens build and own open networks. While the IP connectivity of the networking devices is successfully achieved, the number of services and applications available from within the community network is typically small and the usage of the community network is often limited to providing Internet access to remote areas through wireless links. In this paper we propose to apply the principle of resource sharing of community networks, currently limited to the network bandwidth, to other computing resources, which leads to cloud computing in community networks. Towards this vision, we review some characteristics of community networks and identify potential scenarios for community clouds. We simulate a cloud computing infrastructure service and discuss different aspects of its performance in comparison to a commercial centralized cloud system. We note that in community clouds the computing resources are heterogeneous and less powerful, which affects the time needed to assign resources. Response time of the infrastructure service is high in community clouds even for a small number of resources since resources are distributed, but tends to get closer to that of a centralized cloud when the number of resources requested increases. Our initial results suggest that the performance of the community clouds highly depends on the community network conditions, but has some potential for improvement with network-aware cloud services. The main strength compared to commercial cloud services, however, is that community cloud services hosted on community-owned resources will follow the principles of community network and will be neutral and open

Re-implement incentive mechanisms the global wireless village

Wireless Community Network (WCN) can be viewed as a modern mechanical development. Community networks can possibly offer high data rate wireless Internet access for mobile users, one of the central point that added to their development was the low penetration of broadband access technologies in few nations .Currently the larger part of ISPs do not permit connection sharing for their subscribers, which is the most critical problem in the way of establishing a global wireless community. Furthermore, motivating mechanisms for both users and ISPs are not duly designed in global wireless community networks. However, key ingredients of creating a global wireless village, both user collaboration and Internet Service Providers (ISP) support. In this paper we re-implement the economic interactions in global wireless community networks based on users, ISPs and community providers (Biczoket al, 2011). We found that in addition to the roaming cost, revenue share and the method of distribution of income, the cost of entry have a significant impact on stimulating the user to participate in the community. The analytical result of this work, which carried out in MATLAB2013a tool, show that in fact a really global wireless community network emergence is possible