Scaling Number of Active Links in a Linux Kernel Bond Driver Having Heterogeneous Network Interfaces

Abstract

Previously, a computer or mobile node was able to activate only one communication technology even though multiple heterogeneous technologies like Ethernet, WiFi, and 3G/4G available in the system. The above single communication technology use at a time may slow down the performance, if applications have higher bandwidth demand at a node. However, advent of Linux Kernel's Bond driver tried to alleviate the above bottleneck by allowing use of multiple communication technologies' interface at same time as required at node. Hence, the Linux bonding due to aggregation of multiple wired or wireless interfaces may support fault tolerance and throughput improvement. However, Linux bonding does not specifies, when to select which one or multiple interfaces with respect to one and multiple applications' requirements as well as network condition at each interface of a node. In this paper we particularly addressed the above issue related to bonding the required number of heterogeneous interfaces depending upon applications an algorithm and various requirements at a user's node. We have proposed and implemented it as a daemon in Linux Kernel that accomplishes bonding of only required number of radio interfaces both wired and wireless as active links with respect to bandwidth requirement. This daemon runs at user level of operating system and results reveal that scaling up/down of interfaces does not take significant time. For an example, average interface up delay observed 50ms by help of the daemon.