Efficient and Truthful Bandwidth Allocation in Wireless Mesh Community Networks

Nowadays, the maintenance costs of wireless devices represent one of the main limitations to the deployment of wireless mesh networks (WMNs) as a means to provide Internet access in urban and rural areas. A promising solution to this issue is to let the WMN operator lease its available bandwidth to a subset of customers, forming a wireless mesh community network, in order to increase network coverage and the number of residential users it can serve. In this paper, we propose and analyze an innovative marketplace to allocate the available bandwidth of a WMN operator to those customers who are willing to pay the higher price for the requested bandwidth, which in turn can be subleased to other residential users. We formulate the allocation mechanism as a combinatorial truthful auction considering the key features of wireless multihop networks and further present a greedy algorithm that finds efficient and fair allocations even for large-scale, real scenarios while maintaining the truthfulness property. Numerical results show that the greedy algorithm represents an efficient, fair, and practical alternative to the combinatorial auction mechanism.