
 
stating that, for community A, 5Mb/sec are 
available. However, for community C, only 2 
Mb/sec are allowed. Therefore, only 2 Mb/sec can 
be actually used between A and C using F to 
forward. This is one example of negotiation and 
access control; other examples can include the time 
period of forwarding, the type of traffic, or any other 
attributes or restrictions applied to this community 
concept. 
After all delegations are stored on Peter’s Wallet, 
it forwards the packets. In this case, Joana, as the 
community creator (this is a simplified community 
with only one top node), could have limited to only 
authorizing forwarding during a certain time period 
or using a given bandwidth.  
Again, notice that the names Joana, Peter, etc., 
may not be the user names, but names assigned to 
specific nodes in the network or even unique random 
identifiers. 
6  BUSINESS OPORTUNITIES 
Following the proposed communities’ management 
mechanisms, new and novel business models can be 
built on top of the communities’ concept. 
First, the proposed mechanisms enable new 
nodes/users to join the community automatically and 
in a self-organized approach. This enables both the 
support of access control for new nodes in the 
network and for adaptable shared communication 
contexts. This approach can then be used to build 
micro operators, wireless and mesh based, with core 
nodes fixed and already established in the 
community, with possible network extensions 
through new nodes. For this business model to be 
possible, incentive mechanisms should be in place to 
enforce cooperation of new nodes. Moreover, 
through the communities’ management and access 
control concepts proposed, only authorized users can 
access the community (network) and the services 
available, emulating the same behaviour of access to 
the operator services. Moreover, access constrains 
may take in consideration reputation or resources, 
and be applied to any layer of the communication 
stack.  Finally, the inter-community management 
following a cross-layer approach enables the 
creation of a network operator through the support 
of interaction between different layer communities.  
The delegation concept described can also have a 
large impact in the support of new business models. 
As an example, one community can sell network 
resources (e.g. bandwidth) to another community, 
which contains specific delegation roles to enable 
the reselling of these (or a set of) resources to 
different communities. This can be applied, for 
example, to federation agreements between inter-
domain operators, which define service level 
agreements (SLAs) between each other (the selling 
of resources for traffic traversing their inter-domain 
connections), and even end-to-end agreements 
which contain end-to-end resources available for a 
specific set of services, through the reselling of the 
resources to the several domains on the end-to-end 
path. Another example is again the support of micro-
operators, whose resources can be achieved through 
this delegation process.  
7  CONCLUSIONS 
This paper presents a community-based approach to 
the definition of next generation user-centric 
communications. Nodes and users are encouraged to 
cooperate at all levels, sharing their resources both at 
the application and communication layers. The 
social relationships existing between users will 
promote increased trust in local environments, 
allowing wireless techniques based on individually 
owned APs to become a trusted communication 
environment. Mesh networking is particularly 
adequate to this approach, allowing users to roam 
freely, while their APs establish long-term 
communication backbones. 
These multi-level communities can define their 
own policies and establish cooperation agreements 
with other communities – both at the same and at 
different levels of the communication stack.  
Roles and delegations are of vital importance to 
community management, with all the organization 
being managed according to these concepts. 
Furthermore, such methods allow the creation of 
extended business models where, instead of the 
service providers, users and their relations are the 
driven forces for network operation. 
Current work is focused on further refining the 
community architecture and the integration of QoS 
and mobility mechanisms. Results from prototype 
implementations and real world deployments, on 
metropolitan scenarios, will further contribute to the 
evaluation of the solutions proposed. 
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