Striping Delay-Sensitive Packets Over Multiple Bursty Wireless Channels

Multi-homed mobile devices have multiple wireless communication interfaces, each connecting to the Internet via a low speed and bursty WAN link such as a cellular link. We propose a packet striping system for such multi-homed devices-a mapping of packets by a gateway to multiple channels, such that the overall performance is enhanced. We model and analyze the striping of delay-sensitive packets over multiple burst-loss channels. We derive the expected packet loss ratio when FEC (Forward Error Correction) and retransmissions are applied for error protection over multiple channels. We next model and analyze the case when the channels are bandwidth-limited. We develop a dynamic programming-based algorithm that solves the optimal striping problem for the ARQ, the FEC, and the hybrid FEC/ARQ case