Connection Sharing in an Ad Hoc Wireless Network among Collaborating Hosts

We present an architecture that enables network connection sharing in an environment of mobile, wireless, collaborating hosts. Dual-homed hosts with wireless connection to the Internet share their connection with other hosts of the collaborating group by acting as temporal gateways. The system aims to increase data availability and quality of service while achieving load balancing across the gateways. We focus on collaborative applications that support scalable, multimedia, streaming data, such as layered video. We discuss the main components of the system, namely, admission control, gateway selection, measurement of the gateway traffic and the announcement policy. Finally, we present the simulation results to quantify the system performance.