An Architecture for Exploiting Multihoming in Mobile Devices for Vertical Handovers & Bandwidth Aggregation

Abstract

In recent years, mobile devices with multihoming capabilities i.e. equipped with multiple network interfaces have gained large scale popularity. This multihoming capability enables the mobile devices to connect with multiple diverse access networks simultaneously. However, networking protocol stack implemented in current devices is not capable of exploiting the availability of multiple network interfaces. Multihoming can be used to provide two important services: vertical handovers and bandwidth aggregation. Vertical handover enables a multihomed device to switch its connectivity from one access network to another access network without disrupting the communication session. Bandwidth aggregation enables multihomed device to achieve higher throughput by establishing simultaneous connections over multiple available network interfaces. A number of solutions have been proposed to exploit multihoming for vertical handovers and bandwidth aggregation. However, most of these solutions either require the support of additional network entities such as host agent, foreign agent, mobility gateway, proxy, etc. or they require changes in current widely deployed protocol stack in operating system kernels. Dependence on either network operator, administrator or operating system vendors hinders the large scale deployment of these solutions. This paper presents an end-to-end architecture that offers the vertical handover and bandwidth aggregation services to TCP applications. This architecture neither requires any additional network entity nor it requires the changes in current networking protocol stack in operating system kernels. The paper presents the design, implementation and performance analysis of the proposed architecture.