The deployment of crowdsourced networking infrastructures creates an opportunity for local development, where anyone can deploy a new device, and therefore the connectivity offer can expand incrementally and be sustainable through investment and fees obtained from the demand and consumption of content and services, including Internet access, that compensate the cost of the underlying network. While data flow is coordinated by routing, the economic flows can be coordinated by blockchain transactions. Together, networking infrastructures can become feasible and sustainable, and generate social and economic benefits to any participant in the network.
We have defined in our research a new form of crowdsourced networks, the concept and architecture, and we present MeshDapp, our prototype implementation using a local Ethereum PoA blockchain and a set of Solidity smart contracts on a wireless mesh network with access points and an Internet gateway. The prototype software has been validated in a controlled mesh network environment.
Related publications in the group about this topic:
About the guifi.net community network
Related posters:
MeshDapp - Blockchain-enabled Sustainable Business Models for Networks (GECON 2019 linked to
Code:
MeshDapp - Ethereum smart contracts in Solidity used in our experimental prototype system,
Repositories:
MeshWifiDapp ,
Prometheus-Lua-Exporter,
MeshWifiDapp-Monitoring.
Video: presentation of IEEE DAPPS paper
