Distributed Channel Monitoring for Wireless Bandwidth Aggregation

Abstract

Abstract. Aggregating low-speed WAN links into a higher-speed logical link promises to improve data-transfer rates to collaborating communities of wireless mobile multi-homed devices. Such bandwidth aggregation systems must adapt to link dynamics as the number oflinks and the channel conditions vary with time due to mobility, power dissipation, and channel interference. A monitoring architecture that accurately measures the link dynamics and promptly feeds this information to the system is vital to realize significant bandwidth aggregation performance gains. We present various architectural design alternatives for such a monitaring system, and evaluate them using simulation. We show that a properly-designed monitoring system can accurately measure and quickly respond to changes in communication link performance while minimizing the control overhead.

Bandwidth aggregation in heterogeneous wireless networks: A survey of current approaches and issues

“…Hari et al (1999) show how reorder buffer size can be determined. Link Monitor is crucial for assuring significant bandwidth aggregation performance gains (Sharma et al, 2004). The link monitor accurately measures the link dynamics and avails the measurements to other components of the bandwidth aggregation architecture, thus enabling the selection of a proper set of interfaces and the derivation of optimal packets schedules over the selected interfaces.…”

NATALIE: An Adaptive, Network-Aware Traffic Equalizer

“…But the growing deployment of wireless networkswhere in some cases even links relying on similar technology suffer dramatically different communication impairmentshas stimulated investigations by a variety of researchers [18] [17], [19].…”