Transparent bandwidth aggregation for residential access networks

We propose, implement, and evaluate a bandwidth aggregation service for residential users that allows to improve the upload throughput of the asymmetric digital subscriber line connection by leveraging the unused bandwidth of neighboring users. The residential access gateway adopts the 802.11 radio interface to simultaneously serve the local home users and to share the broadband connectivity with neighboring access gateways. Differently from previous works, our aggregation scheme is transparent both for local users, who are not required to modify their applications or device drivers, and for neighboring users, who do not experience any meaningful performance degradation. To evaluate the achievable performance and tune the parameters driving the traffic balancing, we developed a fluid model that was shown experimentally to be very accurate. Our proposed scheme is amenable to efficient implementation on Linux networking stack. Indeed, we implemented it and tested in some realistic scenarios, showing an efficient exploitation of the whole available bandwidth, also for legacy cloud storage applications.