G-DBAS: A green and deployable bandwidth aggregation system

Karim Habak, Moustafa Youssef, Khaled A. Harras

Abstract: The widespread deployment of varying networking technologies, coupled with the exponential increase in end-user data demand, have all led to the proliferation of multi-homed or multi-interface enabled devices. To date, these interfaces are mainly utilized one at a time based on network availability, cost, and user-choice. Researchers have recently focused on leveraging these interfaces simultaneously by proposing solutions to aggregate their bandwidths in order to ultimately increase throughput and satisfy the end-user's growing demand on data. These solutions, however, have faced a steep deployment barrier due to various system design choices and heavy demand on energy. In this paper, we propose a novel Green and Deployable Bandwidth Aggregation System (G-DBAS) for multiple interface enabled devices. G-DBAS addresses a set of challenges including automatically estimating the characteristics of applications and scheduling various connections to different interfaces along with meeting different energy consumption goals set by users. We fully implement G-DBAS on the Windows OS and evaluate various scheduling strategies that we propose. Our implementation and simulation results show that G-DBAS can achieve the user energy-throughput goals while operating as an out-of-the-box standard Windows executable, highlighting its deployability and ease of use.