Promotional web access service for users of wireless mesh networks: Master's thesis

Ad hoc networking of computing devices is possible with many of the wireless communication technologies available today. When utilized with a special ad hoc routing protocol, these wireless technologies allow devices to form autonomous self-organizing, dynamic networks that have multihop connectivity. Thus all nodes participate in traffic relaying. These Wireless Mesh Networks (WMN) are becoming common especially within home and neighborhood area networks in order to share a single Internet access. In future people are likely to utilize them elsewhere as well. Internet connection provision within WMNs is studied within this thesis. Therefore, a novel service concept called Promotional Internet Access Provider (PIAP) is proposed, which is mainly intended for business customers of ISPs operating within tertiary sector and willing to promote their goods and services to people in the vicinity of their business premises via WMNs. A PIAP provides these WMN users with free web access where requested web pages are locally modified by inserting an advertisement into them. To verify this PIAP service concept, a prototype service based on a caching web proxy server was implemented. Thereafter, the prototype and the concept were evaluated by thirteen test users. All test users were interested in the service and considered it valuable. Locally inserted advertisements were accepted and, in general, people did not consider them distracting. The experiment indicated that this kind of service concept could be more generally exploited.