Improving WiFi networking with concurrent connections and multipath TCP

Abstract

It is increasingly popular that there are multiple accessible access points (APs) surrounding a WiFi client. In an ideal case, the client would simultaneously connects to all the APs and maximize the connections' utilization, for example, aggregating the bandwidth of APs' backhauls, load balancing among the connections, etc. In this paper, we present WM (Wireless virtualization with Multipath TCP) a cross-layer approach that aims to improve performance of mobile WiFi users. The demonstration shows that aWiFi client equipped WM can keep multiple concurrent connections to APs by using wireless virtualization. Moreover, WM enhances the aggregated bandwidth and achieves seamless handover by adopting Multipath TCP.