CUBS: Coordinated Upload Bandwidth Sharing in residential networks

Abstract

Millions of residential users are widely served by cable or DSL connections with modest upload bandwidth and relatively high download bandwidth. For the increasingly important and demanding P2P applications such as VoIP, BitTorrent, and Internet streaming, stable or high upload bandwidth is required. Inadequate upload bandwidth degrades the performance of these applications among residential users. On the other hand, our Internet measurements show that plenty of idle upload bandwidth (from 50% to 80%) is always available in a local residential network. Based on this observation, we propose a system prototype to Coordinate Upload Bandwidth Sharing (CUBS) among neighboring residential users. Specifically, the idle upload bandwidth of neighbors can be used upon a request from a demanding user. Since it has become a common practice to deploy wireless access points in a residential user's home, we have built CUBS by leveraging the support from the wireless networks. In CUBS, to discover and manage idle bandwidth, a localized overlay is constructed by the cooperative users. CUBS is application independent as the bandwidth sharing is implemented at the network layer. CUBS is also ISP transparent because the sharing of neighbors' bandwidth does not demand any additional bandwidth supplies. We have evaluated the CUBS system prototype with experiments on Internet. The experimental results demonstrate that CUBS can effectively improve the performance of upload intensive applications by more than 30%.