What Goes Around Comes Around: Mobile Bandwidth Sharing and Aggregation

Abstract

The exponential increase in mobile data demand, coupled with growing user expectation to be connected in all places at all times, have introduced novel challenges for researchers to address. Fortunately, the wide spread deployment of various network technologies and the increased adoption of multi-interface-enabled devices allow researchers to develop solutions for those challenges. Such solutions exploit available interfaces on these devices in both local and collaborative forms. These solutions, however, have faced a formidable deployment barrier. Therefore, in this paper, we present OSCAR, a multi-objective, incentive-based, collaborative, and deployable bandwidth aggregation system, designed to exploit multiple network interfaces on modern mobile devices. Oscar's architecture does not introduce any intermediate hardware nor require changes to current applications or legacy servers. This architecture estimates the interfaces characteristics and application requirements, schedules various connections and/or packets to different interfaces, and provides users with incentives for collaboration and bandwidth sharing. We formulate the OSCAR scheduler as a multi-objective scheduler that maximizes system throughput while achieving user-defined efficiency goals for both cost and energy consumption. We implement a small scale prototype of our OSCAR system, which we use to evaluate its performance. Our evaluation shows that we provide up to 150% enhancement in the throughput compared to current operating systems with only minor updates to the client devices.