Design trade-offs of crowdsourced web access in community networks

Abstract

Internet access has become a requirement to participate in society; however, the majority of the world's population is not yet online. Citizens can self-organize cooperatively to crowdsource community network infrastructures and achieve Internet access. In order to help address that challenge, this paper provides an analysis of a crowdsourced Internet access mechanism: the distributed Web proxy service in one of the largest community networks in the world. Several perspectives were considered in this analysis, e.g., data traffic, networking issues, and proxies responsiveness. The evaluation results show how the current manual proxy choice, based on social clues, becomes a popular service plagued with hot spots and inefficiencies, which opens several opportunities for improving these infrastructures. By taking advantage of it, our research shows that the trade-offs between informed proxy selection and admission control in proxies, could alleviate imbalances and uncertainty, and also improve the service with little additional burden. This represents an explicit and direct mechanism for improving the service provided by these community networks, and a clear benefit for its members.