Aggregating the Bandwidth of Multiple Network Interfaces to Increase the Performance of Networked Applications

摘要

Devices capable of connecting to two or more different networks simultaneously, known as host multihoming, are becoming increasingly common. For example, most laptops are equipped with a least a Local Area Network (LAN) and a Wireless LAN (WLAN) interface, and smartphones can connect to both WLANs and 3G-networks (High-Speed Downlink Packet Access, HSDPA). Being connected to multiple networks simultaneously allows for desirable features like bandwidth aggregation and redundancy.Enabling and making efficient use of multiple network interfaces or links (network interface and link will be used interchangeably throughout this thesis) requires solving several challenges related to deployment, link heterogeneity and dynamic behavior. Even though multihoming has existed for a long time, for example routers must support connecting to different networks, most existing operating systems, network protocols and applications do not take host multihoming into consideration. The default behavior is still to use a single interface for all traffic. Using a single interface is, for example, often insufficient to meet the requirements of popular, bandwidth intensive services like video streaming.In this thesis, we have focused on bandwidth aggregation on host multihomed devices. Even though bandwidth aggregation has been a research field for several years, the related works have failed to consider the challenges present in real world networks properly, or does not apply to scenarios where a device is connected to different heterogeneous networks.In order to solve the deployment challenges and enable the use of multiple links in away that works in a real-world network environment, we have created a platform-independent framework, called MULTI. MULTI was used as the foundation for designing transparent (to the applications) and application-specific bandwidth aggregation techniques. MULTI works in the presence of Network Address Translation (NAT), automatically detects and configures the device based on changes in link state, and notifies the application(s) of any changes.The application-specific bandwidth aggregation technique presented in this thesis was optimised for and evaluated with quailty-adaptive video streaming. The technique was evaluated with different types of streaming in both a controlled network environment and real-world networks. Adding a second link gave a significant increase in both video and playback quality. However, the technique is not limited to video streaming and can be used to improve the performance of several, common application types.In many cases, it is not possible to extend applications directly with multilink support. Working on the network-layer allows for the creation of bandwidth aggregation techniques that are transparent to applications. Transparent, network-layer bandwidth aggregation techniques must support the behavior of the different transport protocol in order to achieve efficient bandwidth aggregation. The transparent bandwidth aggregation techniques introduced in this thesis are targeted at Universal Datagram Protocol (UDP) and Transmission Control Protocol (TCP), the two most common transport protocols in the Internet today.