Software lets neighbors securely share WiFi bandwidth

Instead of fighting about property lines and whose dog is keeping everyone up at night, researchers from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign want you and your neighbors to get together and share your WiFi signal in a method that supposedly delivers better performance to each individual user. Assistant computer science professor Haiyun Luo and graduate student Nathanael Thompson of the school's Systems, Wireless, and Networking Group have released a free download that analyzes local airwaves and exploits unused bandwidth from one network to complement ones experiencing heavy usage, but always gives users priority access to their own signal. Part of the two-year-old PERM project, the application uses flow-scheduling algorithms to determine bandwidth allocation, and has so-far undergone testing on Linux clients and with Linksys routers. Security is obviously a key concern in such a sharing setup, so PERM developed the software to both "preserve a user's privacy and security, and mitigate the free-riding problem."

[Via PCWorld]

[AdamS @ Apr 28th 2006 4:47PM]

Who the hell even speaks to thier neighbours? Let alone share WiFi

[Brent @ Apr 28th 2006 4:48PM]

UIUC is teh awesome!!!1

[TheWeb20Dev @ Apr 28th 2006 4:52PM]

How many clients can you connect? Imagine a huge cluster in an apartment complex!

[Moto Oda @ Apr 28th 2006 5:19PM]

@AdamS: Um, me and normal, socially-functional humans.

[Todd @ Apr 28th 2006 5:24PM]

There has been a revision to the PERM development project. It is a less complicated implementation, and adds the letter 's' for simple, to the existing acronym.

SPERM helps you share what you got with others


T

[weatherman @ Apr 28th 2006 5:29PM]

It's about time - this has been a big need for the open WiFi movement for a long time. We need an app that's easy to set up (for the non-hax0r types) where we can set aside a certain amount of bandwidth for outside users and make it secure for everyone involved. Hopefully this pans out to a nice freeware app that can be installed on Windows and Mac machines. Which is not to take away from what they've done already - to borrow a phrase: UIUC is teh awesome!!!1

[joelfinkle @ Apr 28th 2006 6:34PM]

Boy, talk about dialing the irony factor up to 11:
UIUC policy forbids installing wireless routers in university residence halls.

[ChatRobot @ Apr 28th 2006 9:18PM]

The disclaimer for that deal will be at least ten pages long.
-----------------
Padfiles.net: http://www.padfiles.net
Chatrobot.net: http://www.chatrobot.net
-----------------

[Agret @ Apr 29th 2006 3:38AM]

"Hopefully this pans out to a nice freeware app that can be installed on Windows and Mac machines."
LOL!! Mac, sif. Mac fanboy. They should just make it into a daemon to run on your Linux server and then you can just connect through that to the network and it'll be transparent. Why run this on your primary PC? Don't give me that crap about "I don't have linux" your not fooling anyone and if you don't you should get with the times and get one immediately. They make old computers 100x more useful :D

[soupcan @ Apr 29th 2006 3:53AM]

my neighborhood has 9 private access points; only 4 of which are protected = free internet for me!

[Bad Boy Supreme @ Apr 29th 2006 4:25AM]

This is a great idea, the cable companies love giving us only 40 kbps upload per account. Imagine if everyone in the damn city was sharing their upload and download idle time.

I know for a fact that nobody in my area using their upload bandwidth from 11pm to 8am. In that time, I could be downloading things at 20MBps.

[Blaine @ Apr 29th 2006 5:33AM]

I used to live in an apartment complex in Houston that had an ethernet port in every unit and either 45 Mb or 100 Mb per second access (cost was $45 extra per month and it was super fast), and this was about 6 years ago. Not wireless but for apartment living this makes sense but the owners have to be committed to it.

http://www.waldenweb.com
http://www.waldenweb.com/Internet_Access/Our_Internet_Philosophy/our_internet_philosophy.html

The place attracted some serious geeks and they had big game nights up in the clubhouse, and a very active email discussion group.

[Keith @ Apr 29th 2006 7:23AM]

This is a pretty good idea for sharing Wifi connections. If with more access points set up within a certain area, there will be a huge signal interference, invisible to human eyes, but noticeably it will affect performance.

My second point of view is that, in terms of ISP, the bandwidth will be catered to a specific fewer client-AP, serving 2-3 households, instead of one every household. This will help to conserve bandwidth, allowing the ISP to supply a better performance for the client-AP. This will be very helpful, since not everyone will be surfing at the same time.

The only drawback is when one household starts to have large downloading or uploading process going on, thereby taking up all the bandwidth, leaving other users struggling to surf the net.

Finally, it is definitely hard to get household to share. I think it will all have to start with the ISP introducing a project for household, giving them incentives, so as to attract such these customers.

[weatherman @ Apr 29th 2006 7:41AM]

Agret: I mention Mac because in my experience Mac users are 10x more likely to close their networks - I don't know if that's because the Mac wireless install software is better about prompting people to set up WEP, because Mac users are more aware of security issues, or if it's just because they're stingy. Either way, I would think that if the security issues could be solved Mac users would probably be among the highest contributors to the free WiFi movement. Damn comsymps.

As for setting it up on linux machines, yes that's fine; it's actually something that should be set at the router level to allow security and bandwidth to be managed even while the primary PC is off. But people need something _very simple_ to set up - easy installation, few choices of options, nice gui, etc. That way people don't have to think about installing it. If it were that easy, we would have to wait for municipal (or Google-controlled) ad-supported WiFi - we could just mesh and cover a city with private signals.

[Daniel @ Apr 29th 2006 7:52AM]

I think that the problem is to know whether the
communication companies are going to allow that by contract or not. At least, in my case, the contract
does not allow the user to share her bandwidth. But it is a good idea.

[Michael Walsh @ Apr 29th 2006 9:25AM]

This research is probably based on a particular Lynksys router that runs on Linux. Lynksys's new routers use newer operating systems, but Lynksys is keeping this one unit on the market for wireless hackers. It's about 59USD and there is now software out there to link several together creating your own "ISP"-type setup. They share up and down bandwidth which each other. If you really DO know your neighbors, you could put 10 routers up with only three connections (for example) and all of you have great bandwidth for about 1/3 the normal cost. If even one of the outside connection has a great UPload rate, then, boy, that would be fantastic.
My guess is that this implementation is about security. The software that is "out there" for these routers permitted all these connections to be on the local LAN, therefor not secured from each other. No Sharing of resources in your own "house" without everyone getting access.

[nek4life @ Apr 29th 2006 9:45AM]

Great Idea, check this out.

Wireless and stuff

Wireless update

[nek4life @ Apr 29th 2006 9:47AM]

Great Idea, check this out.

http://www.djmsp.com/page/2/

http://www.djmsp.com/2006/03/wireless-update/

[leslie @ Apr 29th 2006 12:56PM]

The professor's name was misspelled.

s/Haiyan/Haiyun

See http://www-faculty.cs.uiuc.edu/~haiyun/

Fix the tag and the text, please.

[cesar santamaria @ Apr 30th 2006 11:53PM]

Totally awesome. This could be another option competing with low-scale mesh networks, because(as far as I can see) the transmission of the signal doesnt depend directly on the hops; it just uses the download/upload scale of the cluster in general and find its way to the inet in the closest router available. Pretty awesome. Someone could expect this from MIT or something like that. UIUC made a good one.

[John @ May 1st 2006 5:07PM]

Everyone should also check out Radiuz! (http://radiuz.net) Radiuz provides a "cooperative network" - a user-friendly service to allow communities to securely share their WiFi networks using 802.1x (RADIUS) authentication.