Sharing cost in social community networks

Wireless social community networks (WSCNs) is anemerging technology that operate in the unlicensed spectrum andhave been created as an alternative to cellular wireless networksfor providing low-cost, high speed wireless data access in urbanareas. WSCNs is an upcoming idea that is starting to gainattention amongst the civilian Internet users. By using specialWiFi routers that are provided by a social community networkprovider (SCNP), users can effectively share their connectionwith the neighborhood in return for some monthly monetarybenefits. However, deployment maps of existing WSCNs reflecttheir slow progress in capturing the WiFi router market. In thispaper, we look at a router design and cost sharing problem inWSCNs to improve deployment. We devise a simple to implement,successful, budget-balanced, ex-post efficient, and individuallyrational auction-based mechanism that generates the optimalnumber of features a router should have and allocates costs toresidential users in proportion to the feature benefits they receive.Our problem is important to a new-entrant SCNP when it wantsto design its multi-feature routers with the goal to popularizethem and increase their deployment in a residential locality. Ourproposed mechanism accounts for heterogeneous user preferencestowards different router features and comes up with the optimal(feature-set, user costs) router blueprint that satisfies each userin a locality, in turn motivating them to buy routers and therebyimprove deployment