Improving TCP performance over wireless networks with collaborative multi-homed mobile hosts

Multi-homed mobile hosts situated in physical proximity may spontaneously team up to run high-bandwidth applications by pooling their low wireless wide-area network (WWAN) bandwidths together for communication with a remote application server and utilizing their high-bandwidth wireless local-area network (WLAN) in ad-hoc mode for aggregation and distribution of application contents among the participating mobile hosts. In this paper, we first describe the need for such a mobile collaborative community, or a community, in which multi-homed mobile hosts exploit the diversity of WWAN connections to improve a user-perceived bandwidth and network utilization. Then, we show that existing one-to-one communication protocols like TCP suffer significant performance degradation due to frequent packet reordering and heterogeneity of WWAN links in the community. To address the above TCP problem, we propose a proxybased inverse multiplexer, called PRISM, that enables TCP to efficiently utilize the ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2005
• Where: MOBISYS
• Authors: Kyu-Han Kim, Kang G. Shin
• Keywords: MOBISYS 2005, Multi-homed Mobile Hosts, Multiple Wwan Links, Wireless Networks, WWAN Connections