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A Privacy Preserving Range Extension for Commercial WLANs With User Incentives

Authors:
Johannes Barnickel
Ulrike Meyer

Keywords: WLAN roaming; micropayment; Internet access; mobile Internet; wireless hops.

Abstract:
Worldwide service availability via international roaming is one of the success factors of mobile telecommunications and hopefully also for WLAN access in the near future. Recently, a promising protocol suite for inter-operator roaming in commercial WLAN has been proposed. This protocol suite offers several advantages over other roaming protocols such as secure payment, short time tariff shaping, and strong privacy guarantees. In this paper, we propose an extension to this protocol suite, which allows any WLAN customer with a mobile device that supports virtual interfaces on its WLAN card to act as a paid relay station, or as we call them, Hops. The WLAN provider profits from these relaying stations at they increase the coverage area of his access points even beyond his domain. The owner of the Hop will receive monetary compensation over an integrated tick payment scheme. Like the original protocol suite, our protocol extension offers secure payment, tariff shaping, and strong privacy guarantees.

Pages: 18 to 26

Copyright: Copyright (c) IARIA, 2012

Publication date: October 21, 2012

Published in: conference

ISSN: 2308-3468

ISBN: 978-1-61208-229-5

Location: Venice, Italy

Dates: from October 21, 2012 to October 26, 2012