Handheld Routers: Intelligent Bandwidth Aggregation for Mobile Collaborative Communities

Multi-homed, mobile wireless computing and communication devices can spontaneously form communities to logically combine and share the bandwidth of each other's wide-area communication links using inverse multiplexing. But membership in such a community can be highly dynamic, as devices and their associated WAN links randomly join and leave the community. We identify the issues and tradeoffs faced in designing a decentralized inverse multiplexing system in this challenging setting, and determine precisely how heterogeneous WAN links should be characterized, and when they should be added to, or deleted from, the shared pool. We then propose methods of choosing the appropriate channels on which to assign newly-arriving application flows. Using video traffic as a motivating example, we demonstrate how significant performance gains can be realized by adapting allocation of the shared WAN channels to specific application requirements. Our simulation and experimentation results show that collaborative bandwidth aggregation systems are, indeed, a practical and compelling means of achieving high-speed Internet access for groups of wireless computing devices beyond the reach of public or private access points.