Linux bonding approach for heterogeneous networks

Our proposed solution is a Linux bonding approach to vertical handoff for heterogeneous networks. Currently, there are approaches of Linux bonding implementation for wired & wireless interfaces. The Linux bonding provides methods to aggregate multiple wired or wireless interfaces to support fault-tolerance and throughput improvement. The existing interface bonding allows the aggregation of homogeneous wired or wireless interfaces. There is no heterogeneity available in bonding of various interfaces together, such as Ethernet, WLAN etc. We are particularly interested in using the Linux bonding to bond multiple wireless and wired interfaces in order to achieve faster vertical handoff by providing heterogeneity. In this paper, we propose a daemon that accomplishes the handoff process between various radio interfaces both wired & wireless supporting IP. This daemon runs at the user level of the Linux Operating System and the results show that the handoff is significantly faster for all applications.