Titan: A new paradigm in wireless internet access based on community collaboration

This paper introduces project TITAN, which investigates an alternative construct of residential broadband access. The aim of the project is to increase the utilisation of deployed broadband capacity such as xDSL and cable modem connections. In order to achieve this, we propose a Collaborative Community Network (CCN) where residential broadband users contribute their spare broadband capacity to other users over a wireless medium, to form a collaborative community wireless Internet access network. Our novel design has the strength that it can provide high data-rate wireless Internet access by utilising existing infrastructure, while utilising the community pool of network resources to provide a distributed network management. We build an autonomous high capacity wireless access network using a combination of cognitive wireless access mechanisms and a distributed processing platform to continuously optimise the configuration and utilisation of the network. A novel and interesting consequence of our architecture is a paradigm shift in terms of the boundary between service providers and consumers. In our model, consumers collaborate with the service providers to achieve the goals of high availability, high capacity wireless network access. This paper introduces the TITAN model and functional components and discuss the main research challenges associated with the model.