Bandwidth Aggregation Across Multiple Smartphone Devices

Abstract

Bandwidth Aggregation Across Multiple Smartphone Devices Bradley Raymond ZellerSmartphones now account for the majority of all cell phones in use today [23].Ubiquitous Internet access is a valuable feature offered by these devices and the vast majority of smartphone applications make use of the Internet in one way or another.However, the bandwidth offered by these cellular networks is often much lower than we typically experience on our standard home networks, leading to a less-than-optimal user experience. This makes it very challenging and frustrating to access certain types of web content such as video streaming, large file downloads, loading large webpages, etc.Given that most modern smartphones are multi-homed and are capable of accessing multiple networks simultaneously, this thesis attempts to utilize all available network interfaces in order to achieve the aggregated bandwidth of each to improve the overall network performance of the phone. To do so, I implement a bandwidth aggregation system for iOS that combines the bandwidths of multiple devices located within close proximity of each other. Deployed on up to three devices, speedups of up to 1.82x were achieved for downloading a single, 10mb file. Webpage loading saw speedups of up to 1.55x. iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

A Multi-Carrier Collaborative Solution to Minimize Connectivity-loss

“…Zeller [18] focuses on the problem that bandwidth offered by cellular networks is often much lower than ones that we typically experience on our standard home networks.…”

“…With this community of peers, Zeller is able to pool Internet connections together. The main goal of the thesis is to determine the [18].…”