Towards a Trusted and Cryptocurrency-Enabled Decentralized Wireless Community Network

Abstract

In the context of the telecom network trending towards centralization, the relatively decentralized and citizen-centric, non-profit network architecture known as Wireless Community Network (WCN) has emerged. However, WCN faces challenges related to unintentional shifts towards centralization, the lack of automation and verifiability to handle increasing volumes of information, and the absence of real-time and more flexible incentive mechanisms to incentivize a diverse range of contributors based on the quality of their contributions. As the network expands, maintenance becomes more challenging for small volunteer teams, potentially compromising network performance, reliability, and overall trustworthiness. With the development of the decentralized physical infrastructure network (DePIN), this paper proposes a methodology for designing a decentralized wireless community network (DeWCN) system. This methodology includes the design of a consensus layer, a trust and reputation management layer, and presents incentive-driven oracle design methodologies for verifiable common resource pools. This is the first work in the DePIN domain discussing the design of DeWCNs. Unlike projects like Helium [1], we eliminate the need for specialized devices and mining-based token systems.