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Kadupul: Livin' on the Edge with Virtual Currencies and Time-Locked Puzzles

Published: 18 May 2015 Publication History

Abstract

Devices connected to the Internet today have a wide range of local communication channels available, such as wireless Wifi, Bluetooth or NFC, as well as wired backhaul. In densely populated areas it is possible to create heterogeneous, multihop communication paths using a combination of these technologies, and often transmit data with lower latency than via a wired Internet connection. However, the potential for sharing meshed wireless radios in this way has never been realised due to the lack of economic incentives to do so on the part of individual nodes.
In this paper, we explore how virtual currencies might be used to provide an end-to-end incentive scheme to convince forwarding nodes that it is profitable to send messages on via the lowest latency mechanism available. Clients inject a small amount of money to transmit a message, and forwarding engines compete to solve a time-locked puzzle that can be claimed by the node that delivers the result in the lowest latency. Our approach naturally extends congestion control techniques to a surge pricing model when available bandwidth is low and does not require latency measurements.

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  • (2022)Trust-free service measurement and payments for decentralized cellular networksProceedings of the 21st ACM Workshop on Hot Topics in Networks10.1145/3563766.3564093(68-75)Online publication date: 14-Nov-2022

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      cover image ACM Conferences
      DIYNetworking '15: Proceedings of the 2015 Workshop on Do-it-yourself Networking: an Interdisciplinary Approach
      May 2015
      38 pages
      ISBN:9781450335034
      DOI:10.1145/2753488
      Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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      Published: 18 May 2015

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      Author Tags

      1. ad-hoc networks
      2. low latency forwarding
      3. mesh networks
      4. virtual currencies

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      • (2022)Trust-free service measurement and payments for decentralized cellular networksProceedings of the 21st ACM Workshop on Hot Topics in Networks10.1145/3563766.3564093(68-75)Online publication date: 14-Nov-2022

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