Toward commodity wireless multihop access networks

Wireless multihop access network is an appropriate approach to providing Internet access to applications such as last-mile and rural area communications, disaster recovery, etc. However, the realization of the existing wireless access networks is still limited. The main reasons are that they require particular hardware and software to be installed at pre-defined locations, or it is costly to deploy enough density nodes in a vast area for network formation. This paper proposes a novel approach to automatically set up multihop access networks, bringing Internet connectivity to users by leveraging their commodity mobile devices. In this work, a single Wifi interface equipped mobile device is transformed into a virtual access point (VAP) using wireless virtualization. As a result, each node works in both the station (STA) and the VAP modes to connect with each other forming tree-based networks which extend the Internet connectivity. Users can access Internet through the proposed network easily as if they are connected to the conventional access points (APs) and unconsciously contribute to the network extension. A prototype has been implemented and evaluated to confirm the feasibility as well as the effectiveness of the proposed approach.