TCP Extension to Send Traffic Simultaneously through Multiple Heterogeneous Network Interfaces

Abstract

Wireless technologies has become very popular in recent years because allows users to be connected all the time without the need of a physical medium to transport data. Many mobile devices are equipped with multiple network interfaces to be connected. However, there is no mechanism to allow the use of these multiple network interfaces simultaneously. The use of a single network interface at the time is not enough to for today's application requirements. Bandwidth aggregation is a solution to this problem. However, current solutions require the placement of additional infrastructure to the network or the creation of a new transport protocol, which incurs into additional modification of applications. In this paper a solution to this problem is presented by only modifying the Transmission Control Protocol to allow the use of multiple network interfaces to send traffic simultaneously increasing the throughput while being transparent to users and applications.