PERM: A Collaborative System for Residential Internet Access
Nathanael Thompson, Haiyun Luo · Illinois Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) · 2006
802.11 networks have spread rapidly in residential areas, and it is common for neighbors to receive the signals from each other's home wireless routers. Residents can leverage such an opportunity to improve their Internet connectivity, at no additional cost, by pooling their individual Internet connections together. In this paper we present our design, implementation, and evaluation of PERM, a system that enables collaborative Internet access in residential areas. Compared with related work, PERM is practical in that it does not rely on support from the network infrastructure in terms of advanced naming or proxy, or from the remote host in terms of new transport protocols. Instead, PERM employs automated on-line analysis of the user's networking behaviors, and exploits the recognized patterns to achieve high-performance scheduling at the flow level. PERM is also highly usable for normal residential users. It mitigates the free-riding problem, and preserves a user's privacy and security. We have implemented PERM in the open-source LinkSys wireless router and Linux client. Our evaluation in a dual-homed residential host shows that PERM significantly improves perceived last-mile Internet connectivity at homes.