CUBS: Coordinated Upload Bandwidth Sharing in residential networks

Abstract

Abstract-Millions of residential users are widely served by cable or DSL connections with modest upload bandwidth and relatively high download bandwidth. For the increasingly important and demanding P2P applications such as VoIP, BitTorrent, and Internet streaming, stable or high upload bandwidth is required. Inadequate upload bandwidth degrades the performance of these applications among residential users. On the other hand, our Internet measurements show that plenty of idle upload bandwidth (from 50% to 80%) is always available in a local residential network. Based on this observation, we propose a system prototype to Coordinate Upload Bandwidth Sharing (CUBS) among neighboring residential users. Specifically, the idle upload bandwidth of neighbors can be used upon a request from a demanding user. Since it has become a common practice to deploy wireless access points in a residential user's home, we have built CUBS by leveraging the support from the wireless networks. In CUBS, to discover and manage idle bandwidth, a localized overlay is constructed by the cooperative users. CUBS is application independent as the bandwidth sharing is implemented at the network layer. CUBS is also ISP transparent because the sharing of neighbors' bandwidth does not demand any additional bandwidth supplies. We have evaluated the CUBS system prototype with experiments on Internet. The experimental results demonstrate that CUBS can effectively improve the performance of upload intensive applications by more than 30%.

Insomnia in the access

“…2 the median and the average utilization of a set of 10K ADSL subscribers of a large commercial ISP providing subscriptions with 1-20 Mbps downlink, and 256 Kbps to 1 Mbps uplink. We observe a very low average utilization throughout the day that does not exceed 9% even during the peak hour as also noted by others [24,25,26]. Such levels of utilization are smaller by a multiplicative factor than the level of utilization of backbone links (typically 30-50%).…”

“…PERM [38] discussed how to schedule flows across accessible APs based on predicting of flow round-trip time or traffic volume. CUBS [26] and Link-alike [39] focused on sharing the idle upload bandwidth of neighbors to improve P2P applications and file uploads. COMBINE [32] presented a system for collaborative downloading and specified a framework of incentives that could also help address several practical issues in our proposal.…”

Greening Residential Wi-Fi Networks under Centralized Control

“…Jakubczak et al [7] and Tan et al [28] propose Link-alike and CUBS respectively to effectively aggregate and share the uplink bandwidth of neighboring gateways. Their results indicate that the throughout of upload intensive applications improve by more than 30%.…”

IdleChat

“…Measurement studies that have characterized the properties of broadband access networks [20,16,21,22] show that there are several challenges posed by these networks for streaming real-time traffic. First, the last mile access networks constitute the bottleneck in Internet access [20].…”

“…The measurement study by Dischinger, et al [16] showed that the ratio of downstream to upstream traffic was high, over a factor of 10 in the case of cable hosts. Third, the bandwidth available over broadband networks tends to be unstable, even over short periods of time [21,22]. We address each of these challenges in the design of our system.…”