Efficient bandwidth allocation in wireless community networks

The network coverage and the number of residential users that a network operator may serve through a Wireless Mesh Network can be significantly increased by subleasing the available bandwidth to a subset of customers. In this paper we propose an innovative mechanism to allocate the available bandwidth of a wireless network operator to those customers who are willing to pay the higher price for satisfying their bandwidth demand. We formulate the allocation mechanism as a combinatorial truthful auction and further present a greedy algorithm that finds efficient allocations even for large-size, real scenarios, while maintaining the truthfulness property. Numerical results show that the greedy algorithm represents an efficient and practical alternative to the combinatorial auction mechanism.