A concept for public access to privately operated cooperating local access points

For many future mobile communication scenarios, the traditional operators are believed to be unable or unwilling to support some services, mainly for cost reasons. Thus, there are always gaps in the coverage and capacity of these systems. This paper describes a non-conventional and low-cost concept for wireless access using privately operated local access points (LAPs) contributing to the public access, thus adding coverage and capacity in, for example, homes, offices and public hotspots. The work has been performed in the EU-funded ambient networks (AN) project. A migration path is presented, starting with today's LAPs for private-use-only to LAPs for public use, implementing the AN objective of "access for anyone to any network". The main contributions in the paper are: 1) the identification and analysis of re-use of fixed and wireless transport and access capacity using ad hoc mesh networks between LAPs and 2) the use of network advertising & discovery for LAP concepts.