Transparent Bandwidth Aggregation for Residential Access Networks

In this paper we propose, implement and evaluate a bandwidth aggregation service for residential users that enhances the throughput of their Internet broadband connection through the aggregation of available capacity at neighboring broadband links. Network resources are aggregated by the residential access gateway using the 802.11 radio interface to simultaneously serve home users and to share the broadband connectivity with neighboring access gateways. Differently from previous works, our aggregation scheme is transparent both for local users, who are not required to modify their applications or device drivers, and for neighboring users, who do not experience any meaningful performance degradation. The proposed approach aims at a commercial deployment, leveraging on existing access gateways and ADSL-based access networks.