A cross-layer approach for improving WiFi performance

This paper introduces a cross-layer implementation, named WiPoMu, that aims to improve efficiency and resilience of the traditional WiFi model. WiPoMu is developed based on three key technologies: Wireless virtualization, Policy routing, and Multipath TCP (MPTCP). Specifically, WiPoMu adopts the wireless virtualization to create multiple virtual WiFi interfaces on a single physical one, hence WiPoMu enables concurrent connections with different access points (APs). In addition, WiPoMu leverages the policy routing and MPTCP in order to efficiently direct and schedule traffic flows over multiple virtual interfaces. On the other hand, WiPoMu is transparent to users since it requires no modification in the physical and application layers. We have conducted evaluations to validate the efficiency of WiPoMu on an indoor testbed and a real home network. The evaluation results show that a WiFi client equipped WiPoMu is able to establish multiple active paths to Internet across different APs. Besides that, WiPoMus is resilient to path failure by achieving seamless handover between the active paths. Furthermore, WiPoMu improves up to 300% aggregated throughput comparing to the traditional WiFi model using TCP in the testbed.