Link-alike: using wireless to share network resources in a neighborhood

ABSTRACT

Asymmetric broadband connections in the home provide a limited upstream pipe to the Internet. This limitation makes various applications, such as remote backup and sharing high definition video, impractical. However, homes in a neighborhood often have high bandwidth wireless networks, whose bandwidth exceeds that of a single wired uplink. Moreover, most (wired and wireless) connections are idle most of the time.

In this paper, we examine the fundamental requirements of a system that aggregates upstream broadband connections in a neighborhood using wireless communication between homes. A scheme addressing this problem must operate efficiently in an environment that is: i) highly lossy; ii) broadcast in nature; and iii) half-duplex. We propose a novel scheme, Link-alike, that addresses those three challenges using opportunistic wireless reception, a novel wireless broadcast rate control scheme, and preferential use of the wired downlink. Through analytical and experimental evaluation, we demonstrate that our approach provides significantly better throughput than previous solutions based on TCP or UDP unicast.

REFERENCES

• 1: Broadband Bonding. http://www.broadbandbonding.com.
• 2: Community Wireless Solutions. http://www.cuwin.com/.
• 3: FON. http://www.fon.com/en/.
• 4: FreeNetworks. http://freenetworks.org/.
• 5: The Wi-Fi community built by you. http://www.beta.bt.com/apps/openwifi.
• 6: WiBoost. http://www.wiboost.com.
• 7: OpenWrt supported hardware. http://wiki.openwrt.org/TableOfHardware, July 2008.
• 8: Hari Balakrishnan , Venkata N. Padmanabhan , Srinivasan Seshan , Randy H. Katz, A comparison of mechanisms for improving TCP performance over wireless links, Conference proceedings on Applications, technologies, architectures, and protocols for computer communications, p.256-269, August 28-30, 1996, Palo Alto, California, United States
• 10: John Bicket , Daniel Aguayo , Sanjit Biswas , Robert Morris, Architecture and evaluation of an unplanned 802.11b mesh network, Proceedings of the 11th annual international conference on Mobile computing and networking, August 28-September 02, 2005, Cologne, Germany [doi>10.1145/1080829.1080833]
• 11: Sanjit Biswas , Robert Morris, ExOR: opportunistic multi-hop routing for wireless networks, Proceedings of the 2005 conference on Applications, technologies, architectures, and protocols for computer communications, August 22-26, 2005, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA
• 12: Szymon Chachulski , Michael Jennings , Sachin Katti , Dina Katabi, Trading structure for randomness in wireless opportunistic routing, Proceedings of the 2007 conference on Applications, technologies, architectures, and protocols for computer communications, August 27-31, 2007, Kyoto, Japan
• 13: R. Chandra, P. Bahl, and P. Bahl. MultiNet: Connecting to multiple IEEE 802.11 networks using a single wireless card. In Proc. IEEE INFOCOM, Hong Kong, Mar. 2004.
• 14: B. Cohen. Incentives build robustness in BitTorrent. In Workshop on Economics of Peer-to-Peer Systems, Berkeley, CA, USA, June 2003.
• 15: Jeffrey Considine , Feifei Li , George Kollios , John Byers, Approximate Aggregation Techniques for Sensor Databases, Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Data Engineering, p.449, March 30-April 02, 2004
• 16: Douglas S. J. De Couto , Daniel Aguayo , John Bicket , Robert Morris, A high-throughput path metric for multi-hop wireless routing, Proceedings of the 9th annual international conference on Mobile computing and networking, September 14-19, 2003, San Diego, CA, USA [doi>10.1145/938985.939000]
• 17: Hung-Yun Hsieh , Raghupathy Sivakumar, pTCP: An End-to-End Transport Layer Protocol for Striped Connections, Proceedings of the 10th IEEE International Conference on Network Protocols, p.24-33, November 12-15, 2002
• 18: M. Ihmig and P. Steenikiste. Distributed dynamic channel selection in chaotic wireless networks. In 13th European Wireless Conference, Paris, France, Apr. 2007.
• 19: Srikanth Kandula , Kate Ching-Ju Lin , Tural Badirkhanli , Dina Katabi, FatVAP: aggregating AP backhaul capacity to maximize throughput, Proceedings of the 5th USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation, p.89-104, April 16-18, 2008, San Francisco, California
• 20: A. Kuzmanovic and E. W. Knightly. TCP-LP: A distributed algorithm for low priority data transfer. In Proc. IEEE INFOCOM, San Francisco, CA, Apr. 2003.
• 21: Peter Larsson, Selection diversity forwarding in a multihop packet radio network with fading channel and capture, ACM SIGMOBILE Mobile Computing and Communications Review, v.5 n.4, October 2001 [doi>10.1145/509506.509517]
• 22: Meraki Wireless Network. http://meraki.com/.
• 23: Allen Miu , Hari Balakrishnan , Can Emre Koksal, Improving loss resilience with multi-radio diversity in wireless networks, Proceedings of the 11th annual international conference on Mobile computing and networking, August 28-September 02, 2005, Cologne, Germany [doi>10.1145/1080829.1080832]
• 24: Suman Nath , Phillip B. Gibbons , Srinivasan Seshan , Zachary R. Anderson, Synopsis diffusion for robust aggregation in sensor networks, Proceedings of the 2nd international conference on Embedded networked sensor systems, November 03-05, 2004, Baltimore, MD, USA [doi>10.1145/1031495.1031525]
• 25: Jeffrey Pang , Ben Greenstein , Ramakrishna Gummadi , Srinivasan Seshan , David Wetherall, 802.11 user fingerprinting, Proceedings of the 13th annual ACM international conference on Mobile computing and networking, September 09-14, 2007, Montréal, Québec, Canada [doi>10.1145/1287853.1287866]
• 26: N. Sastry, J. Crowcroft, and K. Sollins. Architecting citywide ubiquitous Wi-Fi access. In Proc. 6th ACM Workshop on Hot Topics in Networks (Hotnets-VI), Atlanta, GA, Nov. 2007.
• 27: N. Thompson, G. He, and H. Luo. Flow scheduling for end-host multihoming. In Proc. IEEE INFOCOM, Barcelona, Spain, Mar. 2006.
• 28: A. Venkataramani, R. Kokku, and M. Dahlin. System support for background replication. In Proc. 5th USENIX OSDI, Boston, MA, Dec. 2002.
• 29: Grace R. Woo , Pouya Kheradpour , Dawei Shen , Dina Katabi, Beyond the bits: cooperative packet recovery using physical layer information, Proceedings of the 13th annual ACM international conference on Mobile computing and networking, September 09-14, 2007, Montréal, Québec, Canada [doi>10.1145/1287853.1287871]

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  C. Computer Systems Organization
  C.2 COMPUTER-COMMUNICATION NETWORKS
      C.2.1 Network Architecture and Design
          Subjects: Wireless communication

Additional Classification:
  C. Computer Systems Organization
  C.2 COMPUTER-COMMUNICATION NETWORKS
      C.2.5 Local and Wide-Area Networks

General Terms:
Design