AMS: An adaptive TCP bandwidth aggregation mechanism for multi-homed mobile hosts

Recently, the number of multi-homed hosts is getting large, which are equipped with multiple network interfaces to support multiple IP addresses. Although there are several proposals that aim at bandwidth aggregation for multi-homed hosts, few of them support mobility. This paper proposes a new framework called AMS: Aggregate-bandwidth Multi-homing Support. AMS provides functions of not only bandwidth aggregation but also mobility by responding to the changes of the number of connections during communication without the support of underlying infrastructure. To achieve efficient data transmission, AMS introduces a function called address pairs selection to select an optimal combination of addresses of the peer nodes. We implemented AMS in the kernel of NetBSD and evaluated it in our test network, in which dummynet was used to control bandwidth and delay. The measured results showed that AMS achieved ideal bandwidth aggregation in three TCP connections by selecting optimal address pairs.