Design and Implementation of Persuasive Public Wi-Fi to Derive Prosocial Network Usage

As the high-speed wireless network spreads, the usage of shared Wi-Fi in places such as offices, coworking spaces, and homes has been increased. Along with the development and diversification of digital content, the amount of data consumed by individual devices has also grown. In situations where multiple users share limited network resources, some content that consumes a large amount of bandwidth like video streaming can potentially degrade the Quality of Experience (QoE) for other users nearby. Consequently, a need for persuasive intervention systems that encourage prosocial behavior is rising taking into consideration the QoE of other network users. To address this issue, this study proposes a "Persuasive Public Wi-Fi" that employs Wi-Fi to incrementally convince users towards more considerate usage of network resources. To be specific, we suppose that the persuasive public Wi-Fi must include three different modes: 1) a mode of normal networking, 2) a mode that can intervene with individual users through a captive portal, and 3) a mode that intentionally limits bandwidth, i.e., Quality of Service (QoS) control. This work demonstrates the design and implementation of the proposed system and presents the results of operational verification using a prototype system.