What is PERM? Wifi Sharing

Check this: http://swing.cs.uiuc.edu/projects/perm/index.php#overview

ERM is the Practical End-host collaborative Residential Multihoming framework. 802.11 networks have spread rapidly in the residential area, and it is common for neighbors to receive signals from each other’s home wireless networks. PERM allows residents to leverage such an opportunity to improve their last-mile Internet connectivity, at no additional cost, by pooling their Internet accesses together.

The presentation goes on with “For a typical residential user, while his
broadband connection is always on, it is probably idle for
most of the time. When the user actually starts Web surng,
P2P downloading, and/or video streaming, popular DSL or
Cable’s average 100700Kbps downlink speeds and even
lower uploading speeds can hardly support more than one
ow. By pooling all locally available Internet connections
with neighboring households’ access (amongst those users
whose service agreements allow non-prot sharing), Internet
connectivity can be improved in terms of lower latency, higher
throughput and resiliency, etc.”

The paper is very technical, it was presented as a research paper, and ends with

“PERM scheduling achieves nearly 15% improvement
in mean transmission time for light-volume ows and up to
27% improvement for heavy-volume ows compared with
schedulers proposed for enterprise multihoming. Compared
with a single Cable or DSL, PERM scheduling reduces latency
up to 50% for light-volume ows, and reduces the mean
transmission time of heavy-volume ows by up to 28% and
62% respectively.”

Source: http://swing.cs.uiuc.edu/papers/INFOCOM06PERM.pdf

This is like co-op internet. Let’s say you are a late night internet movie downloader, and your neighbor is sleeping while you surf, yes, it would be cool to get their idle bandwith. Likewise, if you are out shopping, working, etc… why not let your neighbors get the benefit of your bandwith? What if both people are intensively using the net? Well each person gets whatever bandwith they purchased.

What if some neighbor bought the premium 16 Mbps cable modem service, while you are still using a 768 kbps DSL service , things may not work from a social perspective. Generally people like to share if they feel equal contributions are being made.

With 802.11n networks that are wider in area, maybe this will come into use. PERM is available for download, though some configuration is required.