Sidekick: AP aggregation over partially overlapping channels

Abstract

Abstract-The uncoordinated deployment of many highbandwidth 802.11a/g/n access points (APs) in urban areas offers the potential for WLANs to be a strong complement to cellular networks in providing ubiquitous connectivity. However, given that the bandwidth of the backhaul links connected to these APs is often an order-of-magnitude lower than that of the WLAN channel, aggregating the throughput from multiple APs is often necessary in order for the client to achieve an acceptable level of network performance.In this paper, we present Sidekick -a simple and novel AP aggregation protocol that exploits effective communication between 802.11a/g/n nodes on partially overlapping channels to attain high aggregate throughput in the face of dynamic WLAN and backhaul link conditions. Sidekick is built upon Aileron, which provides an extremely reliable and low-overhead control channel over which the APs and clients can coordinate the aggregation process. The use of such a control channel over partially overlapping channels enables Sidekick to quickly respond to varying bandwidth availability and probe for new transmission opportunities with little overhead. Our evaluation results indicate that Sidekick can make more than 30% improvement in throughput over FatVAP in a variety of situations.

Transparent Bandwidth Aggregation for Residential Access Networks

“…In [5] a new scheduling scheme is proposed that guarantees a fair access among multiple clients, which overcomes the drawback of FatVAP that only maximizes the performance of a single client, neglecting the potential unfairness among all the clients. Finally, [6] proposes to aggregate the access bandwidth by exploiting the transmission on overlapping channels, but it relies completely on a non-standard communication technology. In [7] a new opportunistic approach is proposed to aggregate the backhaul bandwidth.…”

SmartAP: Practical WLAN backhaul aggregation

“…However, using APs with the same radio channel does not scale as the throughput obtained by each client in a wireless network decreases with the number of nodes [11]. [10] is instead a solution where both APs and clients must be modified to exchange signaling information.…”

“…The use of WLANs to share backhaul resources has been discussed extensively [7]- [10]. In [7], the authors propose to normally utilize the wire line connection to the home AP and increase the uplink capacity by connecting to neighboring APs and aggregating their backhaul capacity.…”

Greedy Versus Limited Access Point Backhaul Resource Aggregation in Wireless Local Area Networks

“…Juggler [3] is built upon Multi-Net and improves its ability to quickly switch between multiple APs, thereby allowing efficient use of AP aggregation under dynamically changing network conditions. Sidekick [4] defines a signaling protocol to exploits effective communication between nodes on partially overlapping channels. It relies on low-overhead control channel to attain high aggregate throughput in the face of dynamic WLAN and backhaul link conditions.…”