MultiWAN: WAN Aggregation for Developing Regions

For rural ISPs and organizations, purchasing high-bandwidth, high-quality Internet connections is expensive, if such connections are even available. We propose MultiWAN, a system for loadbalancing at packet granularity across a number of low-bandwidth, low-quality wide area network links. Doing so allows us to create an aggregated connection with performance properties similar to that of a single high-bandwidth connection, in particular that a single flow is able to use available capacity on any connection, rather than being tied to a single link. MultiWAN requires no modification to end hosts and operates as a transparent middlebox. We demonstrate that it provides performance at least as good and in some cases better than traditional flow-based load balancers, approximating that of a single high-bandwidth connection, and show that implementing MultiWAN can be cost-effective for rural ISPs