OSCAR: A Collaborative Bandwidth Aggregation System

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 have enabled researchers to develop solutions for those challenges. Such solutions aim to exploit available interfaces on such devices in both solitary and collaborative forms. These solutions, however, have faced a steep deployment barrier. In this paper, we present OSCAR, a multi-objective, incentive-based, collaborative, and deployable bandwidth aggregation system. We present the OSCAR architecture that does not introduce any intermediate hardware nor require changes to current applications or legacy servers. The OSCAR architecture is designed to automatically estimate the system's context, dynamically schedule various connections and/or packets to different interfaces, be backwards compatible with the current Internet architecture, and provide the user with incentives for collaboration. We also formulate the OSCAR scheduler as a multi-objective, multi-modal scheduler that maximizes system throughput while minimizing energy consumption or financial cost. We evaluate OSCAR via implementation on Linux, as well as via simulation, and compare our results to the current optimal achievable throughput, cost, and energy consumption. Our evaluation shows that, in the throughput maximization mode, we provide up to 150% enhancement in throughput compared to current operating systems, without any changes to legacy servers. Moreover, this performance gain further increases with the availability of connection resume-supporting, or OSCAR-enabled servers, reaching the maximum achievable upper-bound throughput

QoS Aware Wireless Bandwidth Aggregation (QAWBA) by Integrating Cellular and Ad-hoc Networks

Some mobile devices are beginning to support both cellular and IEEE 802.11 based network interfaces. Although rates are increasing, current cellular networks provide relatively low bandwidth that do not meet the QoS requirements of many high-demanding multimedia applications. In this paper, we propose an integrated network architecture that utilizes both wireless interfaces to provide better QoS support by QoS Aware Wireless Bandwidth Aggregation (QAWBA). Via QAWBA, mobile nodes form a mobile ad hoc network (MANET) using their IEEE 802.11 interfaces to share their cellular link capacity. Some mobile nodes act as proxies to contribute their idle cellular links to support a QoS request that may exceed the available bandwidth of any individual mobile node. A K-path proxy discovery algorithm is proposed for fast and e#cient proxy discovery. Simulation results show that QAWBA can significantly improve network utilization and the admission rate of QoS requests