Optimized device centric aggregation mechanisms for mobile devices with multiple wireless interfaces

Abstract Wireless broadband technologies and services are witnessing exponential growth to meet the demands of mobile users. State-of-the-art wireless networks are evolving with enhancements spanning all protocol layers and all network components from radio access to core network nodes. This has been coupled with a tremendous transformation of end user mobile devices towards multi-purpose smartphones and tablets with multi-core processing power, extendable memory storage, large battery capacity, and support for a wide range of wireless connectivity options. A standard smartphone currently can support short range Bluetooth and WiFi-Direct connectivity, local area WiFi connectivity, and long range 2G/3G/4G mobile connectivity. This naturally provides opportunities for data aggregation utilizing multiple wireless interfaces simultaneously to enhance device and network performance. In this work, we present the design, implementation, and testing of optimized device-centric data aggregation mechanisms for both file downloading and video streaming applications. The main novelty of the proposed mechanisms is their device-centric design, which makes them practical and feasible without any changes to wireless standards; moreover, they are scalable to support any number of wireless interfaces whereas previous related work has dealt with devices having two interfaces only. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed mechanisms in terms of performance gains and practical feasibility, we develop an experimental testbed using Android devices and perform extensive testing for several network scenarios.