File Transfer for Mobile Devices in Heterogeneous Radio Networks

In the past, although mobile devices were equipped with multiple radio interfaces, for the sake of power saving, only one was activated for data transmission. The idea of concurrent transmission via multiple radio interfaces has not been seriously studied. However, nowadays, power consumption no longer is a problem in many application scenarios, e.g. VANETs. In this work, we investigate the performance improvement of concurrent file transfer over two heterogeneous radio networks, e.g. WiFi and 3G. The traditional File Transfer Protocol is modified to utilize two heterogeneous radio connections and experiments are executed over the Internet and a 3G data network to measure the latency and average bandwidth. Our results show that it is possible to integrate the bandwidth of both radio networks.