We argue that access to wireless LAN (WLAN) hotspots can be shared in a peer‐to‐peer manner. In the hotspot‐sharing scheme that we propose, peers are encouraged to keep their residential WLANs open, offering Internet access to peers passing by. We call our scheme peer‐to‐peer wireless network confederation (P2PWNC). Payments in P2PWNC are only ‘in kind’. We are motivated by the widespread availability of wireless LAN equipments and the proliferation of residential broadband connections. P2PWNC enables unified wireless LAN roaming without central authorities and without the administrative overhead that is usually associated with such efforts. In this paper, we present and evaluate the decentralised design of P2PWNC.
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Efstathiou et al. (2005) studied this question.