A study of urban IEEE 802.11 hotspot networks: towards a community access network

With the increasing demand for faster data connectivity, different wireless technologies have been deployed in the last decade, creating a heterogeneous wireless environment. Such wireless diversity is mainly composed of 2G/3G/4G cellular base stations, IEEE 802.11 hotspots and Community Networks. Previous work suggests that the increasing popularity of IEEE 802.11 networks would mitigate the overloading of current operator-based cellular deployments. However, the unpredictable characteristics of IEEE 802.11 deployments and its loose coupling to cellular architectures limit its user performance in terms of throughput and mobility capacity. In this paper, we describe an evaluation study of a commercial-grade hotspot network in the city of Luxembourg, namely HOTCITY. Through a set of experiments, we provide a characterization of the hotspot network and give a set of performance indicators. Finally, we evaluate hotspot networks' potential to support cellular offloading through the integration of outdoor hotspots and private access points deployed indoors in a single Community Network.