The Case for Decentralized Fallback Networks
James Lynch, Charlie Liu, Chenning Li, Manya Ghobadi, Hari Balakrishnan · 2024
This paper argues that network and application delivery infrastructures have become highly centralized and are more vulnerable to attacks and disasters than is desirable. It proposes a research agenda for decentralized fallback networks and focuses on a key component---a city-scale decentralized network using existing Wi-Fi access points, which are deployed across almost all buildings in cities. It proposes a routing system that uses information about buildings from geospatial maps instead of traditional routing mechanisms to scale well to millions of Wi-Fi nodes.