| Mobile users are demanding for "anywhere, anytime, always-on and high-speed" wireless services. However, this requirement can not be meet by current wireless technologies. The popular WLANs and WWANs are limited in either coverage range or transmission data rates. On the other hand, the wireless resources are not fully utilized by the mobile users.; In this document, a novel Cooperative Integrated Wireless Network Architecture (CI-WNA) is proposed to take the advantages of both the high-speed WLANs and the cellular data networks for a better utilization of the costly cellular resource. The mobile devices cooperate and share their idle cellular links to the WWANs via a mobile ad hoc network (MANET) formed from WLAN technologies. Some of the peers may act as servers or proxies, providing different kinds of services for the other members in the same MANET. The WLAN and WWAN technologies are combined to leverage their advantages and share the resources of mobile devices without any changes to the underlying network infrastructure. The performance improvement in the cellular data networks comes from the efficient peer-to-peer sharing of the idle resources among the mobile users.; Four different applications are proposed aiming to reduce the power consumption of the cellular interfaces, to improve the QoS of the cellular links, and to reduce the download latency of large files from Internet servers. A new set of network protocols are developed for CIWNA to address on the network formation, group management, proxy rotation, message routing, service discovery, failure recovery, and security and privacy. A distributed trust model and a mechanism for using credits are presented to promote the incentive of cooperation among a group of strangers in CIWNA. Peers benefit cooperatively when they follow the scheme. Malicious peers are excluded from the system. Game theoretical analysis is provided to justify the proposed trust model and the credit system. |
