Multi-hop access pricing in public area WLANs

Public area WLANs stand for WLANs deployed in public areas such as classroom and office buildings to provide Internet connections. Nevertheless, such a service may not be always available because of limited AP coverage, poor signal strength, or password authentication. Multi-hop access is a feasible approach to facilitate users without direct AP accesses to resort to other online users as relays for data forwarding. This paper employs credit-exchange for multi-hop access in public area WLANs to encourage users to cooperate, and proposes a complete pricing framework. We first investigate a revenue model to define the profit of a relay. Next we point out that cutoff bandwidth allocation is a crucial issue in pricing strategy. Optimal bandwidth allocation schemes are then proposed for two bandwidth demand models. Following that we consider a more practical scenario where the relay's bandwidth capacity and the client's bandwidth demand are bounded, and propose two heuristic algorithms SRMC and MRMC to compute bandwidth allocation and/or relay-client association. Extensive simulation study has been performed to validate our design.