Improving Mobile Networking with Concurrent Wi-Fi Connections

Achieving ubiquitous connectivity or high aggregate throughput using a series of Wi-Fi access points can cause serious performance problems for highly mobile clients. While data transfer using a single access point at a time is insufficient for supporting delayand throughputsensitive applications, leveraging concurrent data transfers through multiple access points offers a plausible alternative. To this end, we design, implement, and evaluate a system that establishes and maintains concurrent connections to 802.11 APs in a mobile environment. We demonstrate that existing multi-AP solutions do not perform well in mobile settings due to limitations imposed by the association and dhcp processes and propose an alternative design. We have implemented and evaluated our system on a vehicular testbed. Our results show that our system provides manifold improvements in throughput and connectivity over stock WiFi implementations. We compare our results against measurements of real user needs in mobile settings in terms of application use and desired session length.