Computer Networks 93 (2015) 359372

Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

Computer Networks
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/comnet

Software-dened wireless mesh networks for internet

access sharing
Ahmed Abujoda a,, David Dietrich a, Panagiotis Papadimitriou a,
Arjuna Sathiaseelan b
a
b

Institute of Communications Technology, Leibniz Universitt Hannover, Germany

Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, UK

a r t i c l e

i n f o

Article history:
Received 15 February 2015
Revised 31 July 2015
Accepted 3 September 2015
Available online 25 September 2015
Keywords:
SDN
Wireless mesh network
Internet access

a b s t r a c t
Universal access to Internet is crucial, and as such, there have been several initiatives to enable
wider access to the Internet. Public Access WiFi Service (PAWS) is one such initiative that takes
advantage of the available unused capacity in home broadband connections and allows Lessthan-Best Effort (LBE) access to these resources, as exemplied by Lowest Cost Denominator
Networking (LCDNet). PAWS has been recently deployed in a deprived community in Nottingham, and, as any crowd-shared network, it faces limited coverage, since there is a single point
of Internet access per guest whose availability depends on user sharing policies.
To mitigate this problem and extend the coverage, we use a crowd-shared wireless
mesh network (WMN), at which the home routers are interconnected as a mesh. Such a
WMN provides multiple points of Internet access and can enable resource pooling across all
available paths to the Internet backhaul. In order to coordinate trac redirections through
the WMN, we implement and deploy a software-dened WMN (SDWMN) control plane in
one of the CONFINE community networks. We further investigate the potential benets of a
crowd-shared WMN for public Internet access by performing a comparative study between
a WMN and PAWS. Our experimental results show that a crowd-shared WMN can provide
much higher utilization of the shared bandwidth and can accommodate a substantially larger
volume of guest trac.
2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction
The Internet has evolved into a critical infrastructure
for education, employment, e-governance, remote health
care, digital economy, and social media. However, the Internet today is facing the challenge of a growing digital
divide, i.e., an increasing disparity between those with and
without Internet access [60]. Access problems often stem
from sparsely spread populations living in physically remote
locations, since it is simply not cost-effective for Internet
Service Providers (ISPs) to deploy the required infrastructure

Corresponding author. Tel.: +49 5117622596.

E-mail address: ahmed.abujoda@ikt.uni-hannover.de (A. Abujoda).

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.comnet.2015.09.008
1389-1286/ 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

for broadband Internet access in these areas. Coupled with

physical limitations of terrestrial infrastructures (mainly due
to distance) to provide last mile access, remote communities
also incur higher costs for connection between the exchange
and backbone network when using wired technologies, because the distances are longer. Ubiquitous mobile broadband
coverage is currently not feasible, since direct investment in
local infrastructure is uneconomic [55]. Addressing digital
exclusion due to socio-economic barriers is also important.
The United Nations revealed the global disparity in xed
broadband access, showing that access to xed broadband
in some countries costs almost 40100 times their national
average income [34].
The reluctance of network operators (who are economically motivated) to provide wired and cellular infrastructures

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A. Abujoda et al. / Computer Networks 93 (2015) 359372

to rural/remote areas have led to several initiatives to build

large-scale, self-organized, and decentralized community
wireless networks that use WiFi mesh technology (including long distance), due to the reduced cost of using the unlicensed spectrum [51]. These community wireless mesh networks have self-sustainable business models, which provide
more localized communication services, as well as Internet
backhaul support via peering agreements with traditional
network operators who see such networks as a way to extend their reach at a lower cost. There are also communityled wireless initiatives such as crowd-shared wireless networks, in which home broadband owners share a portion of
their home broadband with friends, neighbors, or other users
either for free or as part of a service offering by the ISP (e.g.,
[6,53]).
Public Access WiFi Service (PAWS) [53] is a communityled crowd-shared WiFi service that uses a set of techniques that make use of the available unused capacity in
home broadband networks and allowing Less-than-Best Effort (LBE) access to these resources, based on the Lowest Cost Denominator Networking (LCDNet) paradigm [58].
PAWS adopts an approach of community-wide participation,
where home broadband subscribers are enabled to donate
controlled but free use of their high-speed broadband Internet to fellow citizens. PAWS was deployed with 20 custommade PAWS routers placed in a deprived community in Nottingham and was also trialed out in rural Wales. PAWS is
essentially a crowd-shared access network (similar to FON
[5]) for under-privileged users in urban and rural communities. PAWS has been facing ongoing deployment challenges,
such as limited coverage, stemming from user sharing patterns. In particular, during the PAWS trial deployment, it was
observed that home users did not share their broadband connection over periods at which either the whole bandwidth or
all the ports of the home router were needed (i.e., PAWS uses
an access point connected to the home router for Internet access sharing). Essentially, PAWS is a crowd-shared network
with a single point of access per guest, and as such, Internet
access sharing is highly dependent on user sharing policies
(i.e., the periods at which user share their Internet connection).
To mitigate this problem, we investigate the potential
benets of extending PAWS or any crowd-shared wireless
network to a wireless mesh network (WMN) by interconnecting wireless home routers. As such, a crowd-shared
WMN provides extended coverage via multiple points of access for each guest. We particularly consider crowd-shared
WMNs in residential areas, taking advantage of the dense deployment of wireless home routers. The main challenge in
the management of such a WMN lies in the coordination of
guest trac redirections, such that the shared bandwidth is
eciently utilized. More precisely, trac redirection requires
the assignment of guest ows to gateways and the selection
of paths (through the WMN) that provide sucient capacity
and low delay. Furthermore, decisions for trac redirections
should be also based on user sharing policies, when these are
disclosed in advance. Given the amount of information that
has to be collected before ow assignments can be made, we
deem a centralized control plane as a more suitable approach
to WMN management for Internet access sharing, since all
information can be conveyed to a centralized controller

facilitating the coordination of trac redirections. In this respect, we leverage on software-dened networking (SDN)
principles for the control plane design.
Along these lines, our contributions are the following:
We present the design and implementation of a SDN control plane for the coordination of guest trac redirections
through the WMN.
We develop an algorithm for the assignment of gateways
to ows that require redirection, taking into account the
ow demands, the residual bandwidth in the access links
and the WMN, as well as, the advance knowledge of sharing policies.
We generate a model for user sharing patterns based on
the router on/off periods captured from the PAWS deployment in Nottingham.
We quantify the benets of a crowd-shared WMN for
Internet access sharing using a deployment of our SDN
control plane in Athens Wireless Metropolitan Network
(AWMN) [4], i.e., one of the community networks of
the CONFINE project [2,3,24]. Community Lab, https://
community-lab.net/ In this respect, we perform a comparative study between a WMN and a crowd-shared network with limited coverage (i.e., one access point per
guest).
This paper extends our previous study on softwaredened WMNs, at which the eciency of a crowd-shared
WMN was assessed using simulations [18]. The remainder of
the paper is organized as follows. In Section 2, we provide
an overview of the software-dened WMN (SDWMN) control plane. Section 3 elaborates on techniques for guest trafc redirection. In Section 4, we discuss the implementation
of the SDWMN and its deployment in AWMN. In Section 5,
we present our evaluation results and discuss the benets of
a crowd-shared WMN for Internet access sharing. Section 6
discusses related work. Finally, Section 7 highlights our conclusions.
2. Software dened crowd-shared wireless mesh
networks
The underlying problem with PAWS or any crowd-shared
network is that they serve as single point of Internet access to
guests within the coverage of the wireless router and hence,
they have no provision to extend the coverage when no bandwidth is being shared. Based on our experience from the trial
PAWS deployment, PAWS routers were not available for certain periods, because sharers needed all the bandwidth of
their broadband connection or due to other reasons, such as
economic constraints placed on home users in underprivileged areas where they are enforced to conserve energy by
turning off the routers at nights. These observed user behaviors entail signicant challenges for the successful adoption
of PAWS.
A potential solution to this problem is to extend the PAWS
network as a crowd-shared WMN. Such a network would
allow home network users to share part of their own broadband connection with the public for free while also connected to each other as a WMN providing extended coverage (Fig. 1). Extending PAWS to a crowd-shared WMN departs
from the norm: multiple users from different ISPs form part

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361

Virtual Network Operator

SDN Control Plane

Sharer

Northbound API

Traffic Redirection

Monitoring

Southbound API (OpenFlow, SNMP)

Research
Device
Research
Device

Research
Device

Community Network

Fig. 1. Crowd-shared WMN for public Internet access.

of the WMN to provide free Internet connectivity, while most

wireless community WMNs today are operated by a single
organization. This raises important questions regarding the
operation, conguration, and management of crowd-shared
WMNs.
SDN can facilitate the management and operation of
wireless networks at large scale. Leveraging on SDNs
centralized control and network-wide visibility, the management and operation of a crowd-shared WMN can be
outsourced to a third party. In [54], we describe a holistic
approach of coupling both social and economic incentives
in designing future networks allowing the extension of
the stakeholder value chain to include more than the two
traditional parties (consumer and Internet Service Provider).
Compared to existing mesh networks for Internet access
sharing (e.g., Freifunk [6]), our approach provides more
opportunities for non-governmental organizations and local
governments (driven by social goals rather than economic)
to become virtual network operators. Enabling a third party
to federate such wireless home networks would reduce the
operating expenditures for network operators as well as
enable new economic models for revenue generation from
currently underutilized infrastructures.
In particular, we rely on SDN to create the notion of
Virtual Public Networks (VPuN), i.e., crowd-shared home
networks created, deployed and managed through an evolutionary SDN control abstraction [54]. Although originally
intended for crowd-shared wireless networks such as PAWS,
VPuN can be also used for crowd-shared WMNs, enabling
resource pooling across multiple home broadband connections based on the prevailing network conditions and usage
sharing patterns. Based on the notion of VPuN, we have
deployed a SDWMN control plane in AWMN [4]. As part
of the Community-Lab [3], AWMN consists of more than
1000 wireless nodes and 30 research devices (RDs) that
host isolated containers (i.e., so-called slivers) which can be
allocated and controlled by a user, according to the needs of
his experiment [24].
Fig. 2 illustrates an overview of the SDWMN control plane.
The main goal of the control plane is to improve the utilization of shared bandwidth by redirecting guest trac to
one of the home routers through the WMN, based on user
sharing policies. As such, the control plane exposes an interface to each home user, allowing him to express a sharing

Research
Device

Research
Device

Fig. 2. Software-dened WMN control plane overview.

policy (e.g., using the sharing policy expression language

presented in [54]). The control plane functionality mainly
consists of trac redirection and monitoring. The trac
redirection module selects the gateway for Internet access
(using the algorithm presented in Section 3) and subsequently creates a tunnel between the home router where
the guest is connected and the router assigned as the gateway (home routers are deployed in the AWMN RDs). Trac
is redirected through a tunnel, since the wireless nodes in
AWMN are not under our control (as opposed to the RDs).
A tunnel is dynamically set up when trac has to be redirected over that path, and it is torn down when it is no longer
needed. The monitoring module collects statistics about the
bandwidth utilization of the WMN and the access links. A detailed description of the implementation of the SDWMN control plane and the gateway is given in Section 4.
3. Trac redirection
Assigning ows to network paths with constrained capacity can be formulated as a multi-commodity ow problem
which is known to be NP-hard [33]. Hereby, we present a
heuristic algorithm for the assignment of the gateway and
the path over which the trac will be redirected through
the WMN. The algorithm aims at maximizing Internet shared
bandwidth utilization by accommodating as large as possible
number of ows. It is executed by a SDN controller which has
knowledge of the WMN topology and utilization, the Internet
access link utilizations, and the user sharing policies. We rst
describe the trac redirection algorithm (Section 3.1) and
then investigate the potential benets of user sharing policies (Section 3.2).
3.1. Trac redirection algorithm
We represent the WMN as a weighted undirected graph
G = (N, L), where N is the set of nodes and L is the set of links

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A. Abujoda et al. / Computer Networks 93 (2015) 359372

Algorithm 1 Gateway and path assignment.

Inputs: G = (N, L), D

SORT(D)
for each d D do
search true
M {N \ nu } // M : candidate set of routers
while (search AND M = )
g argmaxiMC (ni )
for each p Pug
if C ( p) < r then
Pug Pug \ p
end if
end for
if Pug = then
M M \ ng
else
// gateway assignment
gateway ng
path SP(Pug )
search false
end if
end while
end for

// path assignment

between nodes of the set N. Each node ni is associated with

an Internet access link whose available shared bandwidth is
denoted by C(ni ). Each link lij L between two nodes ni and
nj is associated with the available bandwidth C(lij ). Let Pij denote the set of paths in the network G, between the pair of
nodes ni and nj . The available bandwidth C(p) associated to a
path p Pij is given by the minimum residual bandwidth of
the links along the path:

C ( p) = min C (li j )
li j p

(1)

We further represent a ow demand for a guest with the

tuple d = (nu , r), where nu N is the node where the guest
device has been attached and r denotes the ow rate. We use
D to represent the set of ow demands that have arrived in
the network.
Algorithm 1 assigns a gateway and the shortest path to
each ow demand from the set D. The algorithm is executed
whenever there is insucient shared bandwidth in the local home network. Initially, the ow demands are sorted in
decreasing order. For each ow demand, the algorithm selects the home router with the highest access link bandwidth
(i.e., C(ni )). Subsequently, the algorithm identies the set of
paths, Pug , between the local home router (nu ) and the assigned gateway (ng ) that satisfy the ow demand (Eq. (1)). In
case there is no such path, the algorithm performs another
iteration for the selection of the gateway, excluding the previously selected home router. Otherwise, the shortest among
these paths is being identied based on the number of hops
(SP function in the algorithm). This eventually computes the
path for the trac redirection through the WMN.

Fig. 3. Flow redirections.

This algorithm carries out the gateway assignment based

on the available shared bandwidth of the home routers in
the crowd-shared network. Although this can pool resources
from all home networks where sharing is permitted achieving ecient utilization of the shared bandwidth, guest trac
may have to traverse multiple hops in the WMN. This can
lead to latency ination, delay variation, reordering [56,57]
and in general, performance degradation. To mitigate this,
we further use a variant of this algorithm by introducing a
threshold in the number of hops between the local home
router and the assigned gateway. For example, adjusting the
threshold to 1 restricts the search space to the next-hop
routers with sucient shared bandwidth.
3.2. User sharing policies
Algorithm 1 assigns ows to gateways taking into account the amount of shared bandwidth and optionally the
path hop-count. So far, we have not exploited any advance
knowledge of user sharing policies for trac redirection.
Such information can prevent wasteful trac redirections
(i.e., forwarding trac to a router which will shortly become
unavailable for Internet access sharing). Sharing policies
can be specied using a sharing policy expression language
(SPEL), e.g., the XML-based schema presented in our previous
work [54]. SPEL essentially provides the necessary means to
the sharers to specify the amount of shared bandwidth as
well as the period of sharing. This information is conveyed
to the SDN control plane and is used as an additional input
for gateway assignment.
We run a trace-driven simulation of a crowd-shared
WMN to investigate the impact of sharing policies on trafc redirections. In particular, we model the availability of
the home routers using an on-off Markov chain. On and off
times are exponentially distributed with mean values on =
106 min and o f f = 555 min. We parameterize the exponential distributions using datasets from the PAWS deployment
in UK.
Fig. 3 illustrates the number of trac redirections for different network loads with and without the knowledge of
sharing policies. When sharing policies are known, the trac

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363

path 1
Src

Sink

OVS
path 2

delay node (tc)

Fig. 4. Experimental setup for packet reordering evaluation.

number of packets outoforder

225
200
175

1 Mbps
2 Mbps
5 Mbps

Fig. 6. SDWMN controller.

with a large number of guest ows per home router, as the

PAWS router logs indicate. Considering the identied implications of trac redirections, we use sharing policies in the
assignment of guest ows to gateways.

150
125
100
75

4. Implementation

50

We provide a detailed description of the implementation

of the SDWMN control plane and gateway in Sections 4.1 and
4.2, respectively.

25
0
0

100
200
300
400
delay(old_path) delay(new_path) (ms)

500

4.1. SDWMN controller

Fig. 5. Packet reordering.

is directed to the router with the longest period of availability

(among the routers with sucient shared bandwidth). According to Fig. 3, using sharing policies leads to fewer trac
redirections, especially for low and moderate network loads.
For higher loads, the number of routers with sucient shared
bandwidth diminishes, and as such, the knowledge of sharing
policies does not yield signicant gains.
We perform additional tests to investigate potential implications, such as packet reordering and higher communication overhead, due to trac redirections. First, we use the
experimental setup depicted in Fig. 4 to quantify the level of
packet reordering. In this setup, UDP trac is redirected from
path 1 to path 2 at the intermediate node. The redirection is
carried out by inserting ow entries to an OpenvSwitch (OVS)
datapath that has been set up in the intermediate node. We
further employ a delay node, set up in path 2, to adjust the
delay along this path. Fig. 5 shows that the number of outof-order packets increases in proportion to the delay difference between the two paths. Our path delay measurements
in AWMN indicate that a redirection through the WMN increases the RTT with up to 50 ms. This will result in the
out-of-order delivery of a small number of packets, which, in
turn, can lead to congestion control invocations, and, hence,
lower throughput for TCP ows.
Besides packet reordering, trac redirections generate
additional communication overhead between the SDWMN
controller and the routers. Specically, for each ow redirection the router sends a OFPT_PACKET_IN message to the controller, which, in turn, sends an OFPT_FLOW_MOD message to
the router. Taking the respective acknowledgment messages
into account, the communication overhead per ow redirection is 490 bytes. This overhead can increase substantially

We implement our controller in Python using POX which

provides a framework to implement SDN controllers with
OpenFlow protocol interface [43]. Since OpenFlow supports
only the conguration of switch ow tables, we use XML-RPC
interface to install and congure tunnels between the gateways. Our SDWMN controller consists of the following modules (Fig. 6):
Gateway registration: Each new gateway joining the
crowd-shared network is registered with the creation of
a new gateway object in the controller repository. Each
gateway object holds information about the gateways:
(i) datapath ID, which is a 64 bit unique identier for
each OpenFlow switch instance, (ii) IP address of the
WMN port, (iii) ports table, which contains the names and
OpenFlow switch ports numbers (i.e., DSL port, the WMN
port and the guests wireless network port), (iv) monitoring table, which contains the gateway shared bandwidth utilization and WMN path quality, and (v) tunnel
table, which contains the IP addresses, UDP port numbers
(we use UDP-in-IP tunnelling) and OpenFlow switch port
numbers of the installed tunnels. The registration process
is triggered by POX when the gateway establishes a new
control channel with the controller.
Monitoring: This module collects and processes the measurements of shared bandwidth utilization and the WMN
paths delay and hop counts for each gateway. Bandwidth
(BW) estimation in a WMN is very challenging, due to BW
uctuations and the low degree of accuracy of available
BW measurement tools (e.g., pathload [39], TOPP [44],
and IGI/PTR [37]) that was also conrmed by our own
tests. However, in our experimental setup, the Internet
access links are the bottleneck (since they have been congured at lower capacity than the WMN), and, as such,

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A. Abujoda et al. / Computer Networks 93 (2015) 359372

Fig. 7. SDWMN gateway. (For interpretation of the references to color in this gure legend, the reader is referred to the web version of this article.)

the aforementioned WMN bandwidth estimation issues

do not affect the accuracy of our measurements. Using
the OpenFlow protocol, the BW measurement module
pulls the network port counters of each home gateway to
acquire the accumulated number of bytes received/sent
in the network port (e.g., the DSL port). In particular,
the controller sends an OpenFlow OFPT_STATS_REQUEST
message with OFPST_PORT type and the port number to
the gateway. The gateway replies with OFPT_STATS_REPLY
message which carries the latest reads of the gateway
rx_bytes and tx_bytes counters. To calculate the shared
bandwidth utilization, the BW measurement module applies exponential moving average to the counters changes
over time. In addition, the path measurement module
uses XMP-RPC to pull the RTT and hop-count measurements of each WMN path to/from each gateway. All measurements are stored in the monitoring table of the respective gateway object.
Trac redirection: Flows are redirected using the following modules:
Gateway selection: The gateway selection module is invoked when a gateway sends a OFPT_PACKET_IN message to the controller to announce the arrival of a
new ow. Based on the measurements (shared BW
utilization and path length) provided by the monitoring module and using the algorithm described in
Section 3, the gateway selection module assigns a
gateway to the new ow. Subsequently, a tunnel is
being set up (see tunnel installation for further details) between the home gateway (where the ow arrives) and the assigned gateway (where the ow is
redirected). Next, the ow table conguration module
installs the respective forwarding entries in the home

and the assigned gateway such that the guest ow is

redirected accordingly.
Tunnel installation: Using the XML-RPC interface,
packet encapsulation modules are installed in the
gateway. This consists in sending the IP address of the
assigned gateway to the ow home gateway as well
as the source and destination port numbers of the
UDP header used for encapsulation. Upon successful
installation of the tunneling module, the home gateway replies with the switch port number of the new
encapsulation module. This information is stored in
the tunnel table of the home gateway object to be used
later by the ow table conguration module.
Flow table conguration: This module installs the corresponding ow entries in the home gateway and
the assigned gateway using OpenFlow. This consists
in sending a OFPT_FLOW_MOD message to the home
and assigned gateways. This message carries the ow
matching elds [43] (e.g., source/destination IP, port
source/destination) as well as the OpenFlow switch
output port number.
4.2. SDWMN gateway
Our SDN gateway exposes to the SDWMN controller an
OpenFlow and XML-RPC interface to install tunnels and redirect ows (see Fig. 7). Tunnels are created by encapsulating
guest trac in UDP packets (i.e., IP-in-UDP) using the encapsulation module (red line Fig. 7). The destination IP address
of the tunnel header is set to the IP address of the assigned
gateway. For each new tunnel a new encapsulation module is
created. On the other hand, incoming trac (green line Fig. 7)
is processed by the decapsulation module, which strips the

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365

outer header before the trac is delivered to the output port.

Both encapsulation and decapsulation modules are implemented using Click [41].
To steer data trac between the physical ports and the
modules (encapsulation/decapsulation), we rely on OpenvSwitch [49]. This switching module also forwards messages
from the SDN controller to the gateway controller module
through the XML-RPC server. To connect modules to OpenvSwitch, we use Linux TAP devices.
The instantiation of encapsulation/decapsulation modules is performed by the gateway controller in the following
steps: (i) creation of TAP interfaces, (ii) appending TAP interfaces names, MAC and IP address of the assigned gateway
to Click conguration templates stored on the repository (we
use templates to speed up modules instantiation) and (iii) installation of the Click conguration.
Furthermore, the gateway controller collects and transfers the measurements generated by the path measurement
module to the SDN controller. The path measurement module uses ping and traceroute to collect RTT and hop counts of
the WMN paths. A list of gateways IP addresses is passed to
this module to obtain the measurements. The module sends
10 probing packets every 30 s to avoid ooding the network.
5. Evaluation
In this section, we perform a comparative study of crowdshared WMN against PAWS (or any other crowd-shared network with a single point of access). To this end, we run experiments in AWMN (Section 5.1) and further use simulations
with larger WMN topologies (Section 5.2).
Using experimentation and simulations, we initially measure the utilization level of the shared BW and the accumulated serving rate across time and for different ow arrival
rates. To study the scalability of our control plane, using experimentation we quantify the control communication overhead in terms of BW consumption and ow setup delay. We
further use simulations to study the effect of trac redirection on latency by measuring the shared BW utilization
when applying a threshold to the redirection path length (see
Section 3). Finally, we investigate the scalability of the crowdshared WMN in terms of BW utilization and serving rate with
different network sizes using simulations.
5.1. Experimental results
For our experiments, we use 12 research devices (RDs) to
deploy 11 home routers (or gateways) and one SDWMN controller. Fig. 8 illustrates the WMN topology measured from a
single RD. We implemented a tool to analyze and construct
the topology out of traceroute measurements. Using MGEN
[1], we generate guest ows with a rate and lifetime sampled out of a uniform and an exponential distribution, respectively. The ows arrive to the network according to a
Poisson process. For router availability pattern, we use the
model described in Section 3.2. Since running tests for more
than 555 min (the mean value of the off period) is not feasible, we scale down the mean values to on = 10.6 s and
o f f = 55.5 s. In each gateway, we further implement a timer
to emulate the on and the off period of the router. Upon the
expiration of the timer, the gateway sends a signal to the

Fig. 8. The WMN topology measured using traceroute from a research device (blue circle) toward the other research devices (red circles). (For interpretation of the references to color in this gure legend, the reader is referred to the web version of this article.)

controller to announce the beginning of an on or off period.

The time required to generate the signal is negligible (a few
milliseconds). This timer can be also used by the sharers for
sharing policy congurations in their home routers. Due to
occasional reliability issues in the RDs, we restricted the duration of our experiments to 250 s. After downscaling the
router on/off periods, there are several transitions between
the router states during each experiment.
Our main evaluation metrics include: (i) the shared bandwidth utilization across all home routers, and (ii) the accumulated serving rate ASR(T) at time T, dened as:

ASR(T ) =

T nished
t st
nished
T
+ tT strejected
t st

f inished

,

(2)

denotes the total sizes of the ows at time t

where st
which are accepted (i.e., assigned Internet access) and successfully served without disruption due to router unavailabilre jected
denotes the total sizes of the ows at time t which
ity. st
are rejected (i.e., not assigned Internet access).
We initially measure the shared bandwidth utilization
(Fig. 9) and the serving rate (Fig. 10) with an arrival rate of
60 ows per minute, across 10 runs. Variations in the measurements across the different runs were insignicant. Fig. 9
illustrates a low utilization of the shared bandwidth without a WMN during the whole period, although there is high
demand for Internet access by guests attached to the various home networks. In contrast, a WMN allows to capitalize the unused capacity and accommodate a larger volume of
guest trac. More precisely, according to Fig. 9 guest trac

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A. Abujoda et al. / Computer Networks 93 (2015) 359372

Fig. 11. Shared bandwidth utilization for diverse ow arrival rates across
250 s experimentation time.
Fig. 9. Shared bandwidth utilization.

Fig. 12. Accumulated serving rate for diverse arrival rates across 250 s experimentation time.

Fig. 10. Accumulated serving rate.

redirection through the WMN results in the full utilization

of the shared bandwidth. Furthermore, crowd-shared WMNs
can accommodate substantially larger volume of guest trafc, as depicted in Fig. 10. This stems from the high utilization
of the shared bandwidth.
We further measure the shared bandwidth utilization and
serving rate with a wide range of guest trac demands. In
this respect, the boxplots in Figs. 11 and 12 illustrate the
shared bandwidth utilization and serving rate with diverse
ow arrival rates, ranging from 20 to 80 ows per minute.1
These results corroborate the eciency of the WMN for various trac loads, as the shared bandwidth utilization and the
1
All boxplots show measurements across the time period of the experiment, i.e., each point on the graph represents a different time point. For
different runs we calculate the average, the variation is insignicant.

serving rate always remain very high. In Fig. 12, the ow arrival rates of 60 ows per minute and beyond lead to request
rejections, due to the insucient access link bandwidth. On
the other hand, Figs. 11 and 12 show poor bandwidth utilization and serving rate without a WMN, due to the presence
of a single point of Internet access for each guest. Essentially,
our results show the signicant benet that a WMN can bring
into crowd-shared networks, by effectively pooling resources
across all home networks.
To evaluate the scalability of our control plane, we measure the ow setup time and the average control communication overhead across a range of ow arrival rates. We dene
the setup time as the interval between the ows rst packet
arrival at the gateway and its transmission to the next hop.
This is essentially the time incurred for gateway selection
and ow entry installation. We also dene the control communication overhead as the bandwidth consumed to setup
ows and monitor the shared bandwidth utilization. We run

A. Abujoda et al. / Computer Networks 93 (2015) 359372

367

Fig. 15. Simulation WMN topology.

Fig. 13. Setup time per ow.

shared bandwidth utilization

0.9
0.8
0.7
0.6
0.5
0.4
0.3
0.2
with WMN
without WMN

0.1
0

10

15

20

25

30

35

40

45

50

55

60

time (hours)
Fig. 16. Shared bandwidth utilization.

Fig. 14. Control communication overhead.

our experiments on a single gateway (the results can be easily extrapolated for more gateways) and generate 100 different ows for each arrival rate. Figs. 13 and 14 show that per
ow setup time does not change signicantly, while the control communication overhead increases linearly and is in the
range of tenths of Kbps. According to these results, the performance of our controller scales with increasing control loads.
5.2. Simulation results
To run tests at larger scale, we developed a simulator (in
Python) that models the ow-level behavior of the guest trafc in a crowd-shared WMN. The ow parameters that we use
in our simulations are the average ow rate, and their arrival
and departure time. We use the TFA wireless mesh topology
[7] which consists of 21 nodes (Fig. 15). TFA is an operational
network deployed in a densely populated residential area;
that is exactly the network environment we consider for the

proposed crowd-shared WMN. Each node in this topology

represents a home router with shared Internet access bandwidth, whereas each edge is a wireless mesh link. Guest ows
arrive randomly at different home routers. Each generated
ow has a rate and lifetime sampled out of a uniform and exponential distribution, respectively. The guest ows arrive to
the network according to a Poisson process. We simulate the
router availability using our model with the mean values obtained from the PAWS datasets. Guest ows are granted Internet access either through local routers or by redirection to remote routers based on the algorithm presented in Section 3.
Flows which cannot be accommodated are rejected.
Each simulation run comprises 60 h at a time discretization of 20 min. For each scenario, we perform 20 simulation
runs. We assume a homogeneous setting where each router
has 16 Mbps ADSL downlink and set the shared bandwidth
per router to 8 Mbps (i.e., in the periods that each router is
active). We run our simulation with mesh link capacity of
200, 54 and 10 Mbps. This does not have any impact on the
simulation results, since the bottleneck is the Internet access
links. Note that our wireless link model does not consider the
impact of interference and distance on the offered link bandwidth.
The simulation results are in accordance with the results
from the community network. According to Figs. 16 and 17,
the crowd-shared WMN yields signicantly higher utilization of the shared bandwidth and accommodates more trac
in comparison to the crowd-shared network without WMN.

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A. Abujoda et al. / Computer Networks 93 (2015) 359372

with WMN
without WMN

0.9

shared banwidth utilization

accumulated serving rate

0.9
0.8
0.7
0.6
0.5
0.4
0.3
0.2

0.8
0.7
0.6
0.5
0.4
0.3
max number of hops=1
max number of hops=2
max number of hops=3
no limit

0.2
0.1

0.1
0

10

15

20

25

30

35

40

45

50

55

20

60

time (hours)

0.9

0.9

0.8
0.7
0.6
0.5
0.4
0.3
0.2
with WMN
without WMN

0.1
10

20

30

40

50

60

70

80

90

100

flows arrrival rate (flows/min)

Fig. 18. Shared bandwidth utilization vs. ow arrival rate across 60 h simulation time.

The serving rate, in particular, drops as guest ows are not

granted Internet access, due to either insucient bandwidth
(with WMN) or changes in sharing policies (without WMN).
Eventually, in both cases, the serving rate reaches a steady
state. Shared bandwidth utilization for a wide range of guest
trac demands is depicted in Fig. 18.
In our simulations, redirected guest trac traverses up to
4 hops in the WMN. We further use a variant of our gateway
assignment algorithm (briey discussed in Section 3), which
introduces a threshold in the number of hops between the
home router and the assigned gateway. Fig. 19 illustrates the
shared bandwidth utilization for diverse hop-count threshold values ranging from 1 to 3, and without any limit in the
hop count. Restricting the number of hops has a noticeable
impact on bandwidth utilization, especially for a single hop,
since Internet access is permitted only through one of the
next-hop home routers. In essence, there is a trade-off between coverage extension (and thus effective bandwidth utilization) and latency. This may become more critical in large
WMNs, where long paths can inate latency.

shared bandwidth utilization

shared bandwidth utilization

80

Fig. 19. Shared bandwidth utilization for diverse hop-count threshold values vs. ow arrival rate.

Fig. 17. Accumulated serving rate.

50

flows arrival rate (flows/min)

0.8
0.7
0.6
0.5
0.4
0.3
0.2
0.1

with WMN
without WMN

0
TFA (21)

50

100

150

200

topologies with different size (# of nodes)

Fig. 20. Shared bandwidth utilization with different topologies for 60 h simulation time.

We further run simulations using synthetic WMN topologies of diverse size and structure generated using NPART
[45]. NPART is a tool for generating realistic WMN topologies,
based on real-world WMN deployments (Berlin Freifunk[6]).
Using NPART and the Berlin WMN model, we randomly generate 4 additional WMN topologies with 50, 100, 150 and 200
nodes. We set the wireless link capacity and shared bandwidth to 54 Mbps and 8 Mbps, respectively. For all topologies, we generate ows with arrival rate of 120 ows per
minute, which allows us to saturate the WMN capacity with
all topologies. As shown in Figs. 20 and 21, the shared bandwidth utilization and serving rate scale linearly with the increase of the WMN size. This is further conrmed by the
increase in WMN utilization (Fig. 22) and the number of
re-assigned ows (Fig. 23) with larger WMN sizes.
6. Related work
In the following, we discuss related work on WMN routing, software-dened wireless networks, and Internet access
sharing.

A. Abujoda et al. / Computer Networks 93 (2015) 359372

1
TFA (21 nodes)
50 nodes
100 nodes
150 nodes
200 nodes

0.9

accumulated serving rate

0.8
0.7
0.6
0.5
0.4
0.3
0.2
0.1
0

10

20

30

40

50

60

time (hours)
Fig. 21. Accumulated serving rate with different topologies.

0.6

WMN utilization

0.5
0.4
0.3
0.2
0.1
0
TFA (21)

50

100

150

200

topologies with different size (# of nodes)

Fig. 22. WMN utilization with different topologies for 60 h simulation time.

5000

number of re-assigned flows

4500
4000
3500
3000
2500
2000
1500
1000
500
0
TFA (21)

50

100

150

200

topologies with different size (# of nodes)

Fig. 23. Number of re-assigned ows with different topologies for 60 h simulation time.

369

Routing in WMN. There is a large body of work on routing in WMN [20,21,25]. This diversity stems from the different optimization goals of routing protocols (e.g., low response
time, low control overhead, scalability, QoS support). More
specically, WMN routing protocols can be classied into: (i)
proactive (e.g., OLSR [27], WRP [46], DSDV [48], B.A.T.M.A.N.
[38]) where routes are computed in advance leading to lower
response time at the cost of high routing control overhead,
(ii) reactive (e.g., AODV [47], DSR) which provide routes on
demand leading to lower control overhead, but higher response time, and (iii) hybrid (e.g., LQSR [32] and SrcRR [19])
where both approaches (i.e., proactive and reactive) are combined to adjust the tradeoff between response time and control overhead.
Over the years, WMN routing protocols (e.g., AODV-ST,
SrcRR, B.A.T.M.A.N.) have evolved to target particular challenges or structures of WMNs. In particular, AODV-ST [50]
performs routing assuming a tree-based trac ow, where a
gateway residing at the root of the tree (Internet access gateway) frequently requests routes to other nodes of the network. SrcRR computes routes taking into account the effect
of interference on links quality. B.A.T.M.A.N. is another WMN
routing protocol developed within the Freifunk community
[6] to address the scalability limitations of the OLSR protocol
and account for the static nature of WMNs.
All these protocols can be integrated into our SDN architecture for the selection of WMN paths between the home
routers or as a fallback in case the connection between a
router and its controller is lost. In our experimental evaluation, we rely on the WMN for the computation of routes between the local and the remote gateway (i.e., since the WMN
nodes do not support OpenFlow), while we use our algorithm
for gateway selection whenever trac redirection is needed.
Our approach of coupling WMN routing protocols with SDN
is also employed by authors in [28,29,62].
Software-dened wireless networks. Recent work has been
leveraging on SDN for WMN management. Hasan et al. [36]
discuss the benets of using SDN to decouple the operation and management of rural wireless networks from the
physical infrastructure. Our work is in the same direction,
but we focus on the management of crowd-shared WMN in
residential areas and investigate techniques for the ecient
utilization of the shared bandwidth. Authors in [28,29,62]
present OpenFlow-based architectures for WMNs with emphasis on mobility management, routing, and load balancing. Dimogerontakis et al. [30] propose a SDN extension to
WMN community networks for L2 experimentation. Other
applications of SDN to the wireless network domain include
OpenRoads [63] and OpenSDWN [59], which propose solutions for mobility management using OpenFlow. These techniques are complimentary to our work and can be integrated
into our SDN control plane to facilitate mobility management
in crowd-shared WMNs. Furthermore, authors in [52] investigate and evaluate the SDN control plane distribution for
WMNs with emphasis on master controller selection. This
can complement our work to provide higher resilience and
SDN controller availability.
Internet access sharing.FON [5], Kabel Deutschland (KD)
[17], Deutsche Telekom (DT) [16] and British Telecom (BT)
[8] are among the network operators that provide free
Internet access to their subscribers via a large number

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of shared hotspots. For example, BT and KD use Home

Hub and homespot, respectively, for Internet access sharing
with other subscribers. Furthermore, DT and BT have partnered with FON to provide Internet access through shared
home broadband connections. These efforts have also been
supported by several affordable, easy-to-install and openrmware wireless routers offered by manufacturers such as
FON [9], openMesh [15], Linksys [13], and Netgear [14]. Our
approach leverages on SDN to bring the following benets to
Internet access sharing: (i) reduction of operational expenses
for home networks and ISPs, since the deployment, conguration, and operation of crowd-shared networks can be outsourced to third-parties (i.e., virtual network operators), and
(ii) better coordination of network congurations for trac
redirections, due to the global WMN view and the collection
of all monitoring and sharing policy information in a centralized controller.
In addition, Link-alike [40] promotes sharing by aggregating the uplink bandwidth of the broadband connections
through WMN, such that home users have access to higher
upstream capacity. On the other hand, ARBOR [61] aggregates
broadband connection bandwidth (both uplink and downlink) from multiple WiFi networks. We achieve the same goal
(i.e., high utilization of the shared bandwidth) via guest trafc redirections through the WMN, enabling resource pooling
from all shared broadband connections.
7. Conclusions
In this paper, we investigated the benets of extending
the coverage of any crowd-shared network (e.g., PAWS) by
connecting the home routers as a mesh. A crowd-shared
WMN can mitigate the fundamental problem of any crowdshared network, i.e., the presence of a single point of access for each guest. We showed that the advance knowledge of user sharing policies can reduce the number of guest
ow redirections (particularly for low and moderate network
loads) avoiding implications, such as packet reordering and
control communication overhead. This leads to a signicantly
higher utilization of the shared bandwidth, as opposed to a
crowd-shared network with a single point of access where a
portion of the shared bandwidth is wasted. This, in turn, enables a software-dened crowd-shared WMN to accommodate a substantially larger volume of guest trac.
SDN brings signicant benets to crowd-shared networks, as all sharing policy and WMN utilization information
can be conveyed to a centralized controller facilitating the
assignment of guest ows to gateways and the trac redirection congurations in the WMN. In contrast, a decentralized
crowd-shared WMN management would require synchronization primitives and could yield slow convergence, especially at the event of message loss. Our experimental results
show that our SDWMN control plane exhibits low per-ow
setup time and low control communication overhead.
Deploying a SDWMN in the real world raises challenges,
such as the controller placement, control plane distribution for robustness and load balancing, and SDN support
SDN in home routers. We envision hosting the SDN controller as a virtual machine in micro-datacenters hosted by
large ISPs [35]. Micro-data centers are small DCs deployed
at POP and network aggregation points. By deploying the

controller in micro-DCs we ensure low communication delay with the home routers and scalable processing power
to cope with high loads (scale up the controller computation capacity by using more servers). We can further leverage
on several frameworks to distribute the control load across
multiple servers, leading to faster response time and providing a fallback controller in case of failure [22,23,31,42,52]. In
terms of SDN support in home networks, there are already
OpenFlow-based wireless routers (e.g., HP [11], Meru [12]).
Furthermore, OpenFlow has been ported to OpenWRT [9,10],
allowing wireless routers running OpenWRT to be congured
using OpenFlow. This essentially facilitates the extension of
PAWS as a crowd-shared SDWMN, since PAWS already uses
wireless routers with OpenWRT-based rmware.
Content caching and the ever-growing penetration of online social networks (OSN) create for more opportunities
in software-dened crowd-shared networks. More specically, popular content can be placed in caches within home
networks, while the SDN controller can redirect guests to
caches, conserving bandwidth in shared broadband connections. Furthermore, information can be utilized from OSNs
in order to associate and authenticate guests to access points
that belong to their online friends, leveraging on the trust between two parties with an OSN relationship [26]. In future
work, we plan to investigate any potential benets by coupling content caching and OSNs with crowd-shared WMNs.
Acknowledgments
This work was partially supported by the EU CONFINE
Project (288535). We thank Amr Rizk for his help in modeling
the home router on/off periods.
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Ahmed Abujoda graduated in electrical engineering from the university of Sanaa, Yemen, in
2004. He also obtained a master of science degree in Mechatronics engineering from University
of Siegen, Germany, in 2009. Since 2010, he has
been working towards the Ph.D. degree in electrical and computer engineering at the Institute
for Communications Technology at the Leibniz
Universitt Hannover, Germany. His research interests include software-dened networking, network function virtualization and network management. Ahmed Abujoda is a student member of
IEEE.
David Dietrich graduated in electrical engineering from the Universitt Kassel, Germany, in 2006.
During the years 2006 until 2009 he was a software engineer for real-time simulation of automotive communications networks. Since 2010, he
has been working towards the Ph.D. degree in
electrical and computer engineering at the Institute for Communications Technology at the Leibniz Universitt Hannover, Germany. He also participated in several research projects, e.g., the EUfunded T-NOVA project and the national project
G-Lab. His research interests include network virtualization and network management with focus
on algorithms and optimization. David Dietrich is a student member of IEEE
and ACM.

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A. Abujoda et al. / Computer Networks 93 (2015) 359372

Panagiotis Papadimitriou is an Assistant Professor at the Communications Technology Institute of Leibniz Universitt Hannover. He received
a Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering
from Democritus University of Thrace, Greece, in
2008. From 2008 to 2010, Panagiotis was a PostDoctoral Researcher at the Computing Department of Lancaster University, UK, and at Telecom
SudParis, France. Panagiotis received the runnerup Poster Award at ACM SIGCOMM 2009 and the
Best Paper Award at IFIP WWIC 2012. The research activities of his group currently span nextgeneration Internet architectures, network function virtualization, software-dened networks, and cloud networking.

Arjuna Sathiaseelan is a Senior Research Associate at the Computer Laboratory, University of

Cambridge. He leads the Networking for Development (N4D Lab). The research group conducts research on novel Internet architectures for improving and reducing the cost of Internet access. He is
the Chair of IRTF Global Access to the Internet for
All (GAIA) research group and a member of the
Internet Research Steering Group (IRSG). He has
a Ph.D. in Networking from Kings College London
(2005), M.Sc. in Computing and Internet Systems
from Kings College London (2001) and Bachelors
in Computer Science and Engineering from NIT,
Trichy, India (2000).