Incentives and algorithms for broadband access sharing

The unprecedented growth of the mobile (Smart)phone industry that comes together with the corresponding application development market has made apparent that mobile networking through 3G links is just about to reach an unbreakable limit, in terms of network capacity. The networking research community has recently started considering alternative connectivity approaches to support and boost the performance of mobile networking. In particular, researchers have identified a big amount of "power", hidden at the edges of the network, which remains there unexploited and is no other than the WiFi technology deployed in home-networks. We explore incentives and algorithms for Broadband Access Sharing to support nomadic users and show that ubiquitous connectivity in densely populated areas is already possible, since the infrastructure is already there, waiting to be used.