Design and implementation of a socket-level bandwidth aggregation mechanism for wireless networks

Abstract

This paper proposes a mechanism to aggregate bandwidth of multiple network interfaces on a computer. Recently one single computer entails multiple different wireless network interfaces, such as IEEE 802.11a/b/g/n, Bluetooth, WiMAX, and so on. They can be combined, and we can aquire broad bandwidth. We designed and developed a Socket-level Bandwidth Aggregation Mechanism (SBAM). SBAM can aggregate multiple interfaces on a computer to offer broad bandwidth. In addition, implementation in socket layer causes easy deployment and adaptation to existing environment. We evaluated SBAM under actual wireless network environments. SBAM offers broad bandwidth by utilizing various wireless devices on a computer while it avoids modification to existing environment.

BATCP: Bandwidth-Aggregation Transmission Control Protocol

“…Solutions found in [26,44,45] require neither the modification of existing protocols nor the use of extra hardware. However, existing applications must be modified in order to open sockets from specific implementations.…”

“…This result is comparable to BATCP3 and BATCP4, where the traffic using the HSPA network interface also behaves in burst mode, achieving 78.8% and 79.7% network utilization, respectively. The low tier of proposed solutions comprises pTCP [28][29][30] and SBAM [44] solutions, with an exploitation rate of 60% and 41%, respectively. In BATCP, when one stable network is used in combination with a network with high jitter and delay, it achieves an exploitation rate ranging from 64% to 68%, outperforming prior solutions even when is performing poorly.…”

SymCo: Symbiotic Coexistence of Single-hop and Multi-hop Transmissions in Next-generation Wireless Mesh Networks

“…However, mechanisms presented in these studies require significant system level changes [43][44][45] and incur network overhead [46]. Moreover, these mechanisms demand packet reordering, which is a challenging task [47].…”

“…It is worth mentioning that the flow-level distribution in SymCo does not require significant system level changes, which is required in many state-of-the-art mechanisms for simultaneously activating multiple radios [43][44][45]. Besides, the flow-level distribution does not incur any network overhead, which happens in many state-of-the-art mechanisms [46].…”

Design, implementation, and evaluation of a Programmable Bandwidth Aggregation System for home networks

“…Application-aware BASs (Joseph et al, 2004;Qureshi and Guttag, 2005;Sakakibara et al, 2006;Sivakumar et al, 2000) either provide applications with primitive bandwidth aggregation APIs or need information about application requirements (which can be provided by the application or inferred by examining packets of the application). Application-aware BASs allow applications to utilize them as a library or service (Sakakibara et al, 2006;Sivakumar et al, 2000) and distribute packets among computers in the group according to application requirements.…”