An optimal deployable bandwidth aggregation system

The explosive increase in data demand coupled with the rapid deployment of various wireless access technologies have led to the increase of number of multi-homed or multi-interface enabled devices. Fully exploiting these interfaces has motivated researchers to propose numerous solutions that aggregate their available bandwidths to increase overall throughput and satisfy the end-user’s growing data demand. These solutions, however, do not utilize their interfaces to the maximum without network support, and more importantly, have faced a steep deployment barrier. In this paper, we propose an optimal deployable bandwidth aggregation system (DBAS) for multi-interface enabled devices. We present the DBAS architecture that does not introduce any intermediate hardware, modify current operating systems, modify socket implementations, nor require changes to current applications or legacy servers. The DBAS architecture is designed to automatically estimate the characteristics of applications and dynamically schedule various connections and/or packets to different interfaces. We also formulate our optimal scheduler as a mixed integer programming problem yielding an efficient solution. We evaluate DBAS via implementation on the Windows OS and further verify our results with simulations on NS2. Our evaluation shows that, with current Internet characteristics, DBAS reaches the throughput upper bound with no modifications to legacy servers. It also highlights the significant enhancements in the response time introduced by DBAS, which directly enhances the user experience. 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.