Social sharing of connectivity resources: control and encouragement of unselfishness in mobile environments

In the last years has clearly emerged the opportunity of extending traditional single-hop wireless technologies for Internet connectivity, by introducing practical effective solutions to dynamically use the best multi-hop heterogeneous paths available at runtime. Our primary idea is to enable, via proper, context-aware, and effective middleware, the mass of mobile devices already in the market to collaborate together toward innovative forms of Multi-hop Multi-path Heterogeneous Connectivity. Potential advantages are multiple, from extended wireless coverage to "green" cost reduction via cooperative sharing, from balancing energy consumption of collaborative nodes to maximizing overall bandwidth. In particular, this work-in-progress paper originally concentrates on the challenging issue of promoting connectivity sharing via effective forms of network management and control, capable of i) monitoring the selfish/collaborative behaviors of participants in a very lightweight way, ii) fairly distributing relay duties in order not to penalize too much "generous" nodes, and iii) rewarding cooperativeness by limiting the consumption of shared resources and by privileging unselfish participants. To that purpose, the paper presents original solution guidelines based on the regional fairness principle to achieve effectiveness and limited overhead; they can relevantly contribute to encourage connectivity sharing in open and dynamic deployment environments.