The Case for Decentralized Fallback Networks

This paper argues that network and application delivery infrastructures have become highly centralized and are more vulnerable to attacks and disasters than is desirable. It proposes a research agenda for decentralized fallback networks and focuses on a key component---a city-scale decentralized network using existing Wi-Fi access points, which are deployed across almost all buildings in cities. It proposes a routing system that uses information about buildings from geospatial maps instead of traditional routing mechanisms to scale well to millions of Wi-Fi nodes.