Design, implementation, and evaluation of a Programmable Bandwidth Aggregation System for home networks

Bandwidth aggregation is a promising technology that can speed up access to the Internet by bandwidth sharing and multi-path communication. Current Bandwidth Aggregation Systems (BASs) deployed in public networks provide limited performance and flexibility when they are directly used in home networking environments. To reap the full performance benefits of BASs in home networks, they need to be easily and dynamically programmable by home network users. We present the design and implementation of a Programmable Bandwidth Aggregation System (PBAS) that can provide home network users improved performance when sharing bandwidth for activities that access the Internet. We also present an empirical performance evaluation of the system and we demonstrate the superior efficiency of our proposed PBAS over a traditional BAS in terms of computational overheads, loadable code, throughput performance, and programmability.