Title :
TMC Information for authors
Author :
Kyu-Han Kim ; Shin, Kang G.
Author_Institution :
Michigan Univ., Ann Arbor
fDate :
5/1/2007 12:00:00 AM
Abstract :
Multihomed mobile hosts in physical proximity may spontaneously team up to form a community and run high-bandwidth applications by pooling their low wireless wide-area network (WWAN) bandwidths together for communication with a remote application server. Utilizing their high-bandwidth wireless local-area network (WLAN), the thus-teamed mobile hosts can aggregate and distribute the application content among themselves. This paper first justifies the need for such a mobile collaborative community (MC2), or a community, to improve user-perceived network bandwidth and utilization. Then, existing one-to-one communication protocols like TCP are shown to suffer significant performance degradation due to frequent out-of-order packet deliveries. To address this TCP problem, we propose a proxy-based inverse multiplexer, called PRISM, that enables TCP to efficiently utilize the community members´ WWAN connections while avoiding the performance degradation. PRISM runs at the proxy´s network layer as a routing component and stripes each TCP flow over multiple WWAN links by exploiting the transport-layer feedback information. Moreover, it masks a variety of adverse effects specific to each WWAN link via an intelligent ACK-control mechanism. Finally, PRISM enables TCP to respond correctly to dynamically changing network states through a sender-side enhancement of congestion control. PRISM has been evaluated with experimentation on a testbed as well as in ns-2-based simulation. Our experimental evaluation has shown PRISM to improve TCP´s performance by up to 310 percent, even with two collaborative mobile hosts. Our in-depth simulation study has also shown that PRISM delivers a near-optimal aggregated bandwidth in the community and improves network utilization significantly.
Keywords :
multiplexing equipment; telecommunication congestion control; telecommunication network routing; transport protocols; wide area networks; wireless LAN; PRISM; WLAN; WWAN links; congestion control; intelligent ACK-control mechanism; inverse-multiplexed TCP; mobile collaborative community; one-to-one communication protocols; out-of-order packet deliveries; performance degradation; proxy-based inverse multiplexer; sender-side enhancement; transport-layer feedback information; user-perceived network bandwidth; wireless local-area network; wireless networks; wireless wide-area network;
Journal_Title :
Mobile Computing, IEEE Transactions on
DOI :
10.1109/TMC.2007.1049