A Transport Layer Approach for Achieving Aggregate Bandwidths on Multi-homed Mobile Hosts

Hung-Yun Hsieh and Raghupathy Sivakumar
GNAN Research Group
School of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Georgia Institute of Technology

MOBICOM 2002, September 23-28, Atlanta, GA, USA


Abstract

Due to the availability of a wide variety of wireless access technologies, a mobile host can potentially have subscriptions and access to more than one wireless network at a given time. In this paper, we consider such a multi-homed mobile host, and address the problem of achieving bandwidth aggregation by striping data across the multiple interfaces of the mobile host. We show that both link layer striping approaches and application layer techniques that stripe data across multiple TCP sockets do not achieve the optimal bandwidth aggregation due to a variety of factors specific to wireless networks. We propose an end-to-end transport layer approach called pTCP that effectively performs bandwidth aggregation on multi-homed mobile hosts. We show through simulations that pTCP achieves the desired goals under a variety of network conditions.


Paper: [pdf (289KB)]