BAPU: Efficient and practical bunching of access point uplinks

Abstract

Today’s throttled uplink of residential broadband renders a broad class of popular applications such as HD video uploading and large file transfer impractical. Aggregation of WiFi APs is one way to bypass this limitation. Motivated by this problem, we present BaPu (Bunching of Access Point Uplinks) to achieve two major goals: (1) support commodity clients by refraining from client modifications, (2) support both UDP and TCP based applications. We justify the need for client transparency and generic transport layer support and present new challenges. In particular, a naive multiplexing of a single TCP session through multiple paths results in a significant performance degradation. We describe BaPu’s mechanisms and design. We developed a prototype of BaPu with commodity hardware, and our extensive experiments show that BaPu aggregates up to 95% of the total uplink capacity for UDP and 88% for TCP.