ClubADSL: Enhancing Bandwidth Aggregation in your Neighborhood

Speaker: Dr. D. Giustiniano Abstract: ADSL is becoming the standard form of residential and small-business broadband access to the Internet due, primarily, to its low deployment cost. These ADSL residential lines are often deployed with Access Points (AP) that provide wireless connectivity. While the ADSL technology has showed evident limits in terms of capacity, the short-range wireless communication can guarantee a similar or higher capacity. Even more important, it is often possible for a residential wireless client to be in range of several other APs belonging to nearby neighbors with ADSL connections. Therefore, it is possible for a wireless client to simultaneously connect to several APs in range and effectively aggregate their available ADSL bandwidth. Recent works have shown promising results within this area, but main important questions are still unresolved:i) how can we guarantee a fair distributed bandwidth allocation among clients? ii) how the latency of TCP connection can be affected by AP connections over multiple frequencies? iii) how can we minimize the MAC cost of managing these multiple APs? In order to answer to these questions, we introduce ClubADSL, a prototype wireless client that can aggregate the capacity of multi-frequency APs. ClubADSL achieves fairness through distributed pressure schemes and minimizes the impact of end-to-end latency on the system performance with a resource allocation scheme based on Access-Point slot assignment. We show the feasibility of such a system in seamlessly transmitting TCP traffic, and validate its experimental implementation over commodity hardware in controlled scenarios. [Joint Work with Alberto Lopez, Eduard Goma, Julian Morillo,Pablo Rodriguez].