Crowsourcing: A novel approach to organizing WiFi community networks

An operator-assisted crowdsourced WiFi community network can provide high-speed wireless data services in an inexpensive way, by encouraging a set of individual users to form a community and share their private home WiFi access points (APs) with others. Such a novel paradigm has shown great promise in achieving the ubiquitous and full coverage networks. In this paper, we perform a systemic analysis for such a community network, where users are heterogeneous in terms of both the network evaluation and the home location popularity. We formulate the interactions between the network operator and users as a non-cooperative game, and focus on the operator's pricing scheme design and the users' behavior analysis. Specifically, we propose a hybrid pricing scheme combining both the fixed price (e.g., the monthly fee) and the usage-based price (proportional to the WiFi connection time) for AP sharing among users. After analyzing users' best response towards the given pricing scheme, we characterize the dynamic changes of the membership distribution over time and indicate the market equilibrium. Simulation results show that under the different pricing schemes and different roaming qualities, the equilibrium social welfare can be increased to 137% to 147%, comparing with the tradition non-crowdsourced system.