Bandwidth aggregation in allied WiFi routers

Abstract

Residential and small business customers often have need for high instantaneous download throughput for their Internet transactions which can exceed the throughput provided by the customer's Internet Service Provider (ISP). At the same time, these peak demand periods are relatively brief and may constitute only a few hours a day. During the non-peak periods, these customers have an unused Internet capacity that could be used by others. In this work, we propose and evaluate a bandwidth aggregation system for wireless routers. This system allows neighboring users to form bandwidth pools from the users' connections to their ISPs, allowing users to achieve aggregated instantaneous bandwidth. By transparently segmenting large Web requests, our approach avoids changes to the users' machines, ISPs, or remote servers. We implement and evaluate such a system and discuss related issues.