BaPu: Efficient and Practical Bunching of Access Point Uplinks

Abstract

Today's increasing demand for wirelessly uploading a large volume of User Generated Content (UGC) is still significantly limited by the throttled backhaul of residential broadband (typically between 1 and 3Mbps). We propose BaPu, a carefully designed system with implementation for bunching WiFi access points' backhaul to achieve a high aggregated throughput. BaPu is inspired by a decade of networking design principles and techniques to enable efficient TCP over wireless links and multipath. BaPu aims to achieve two major goals:1) requires no client modification for easy incremental adoption; 2) supports not only UDP, but also TCP traffic to greatly extend its applicability to a broad class of popular applications such as HD streaming or large file transfer. We prototyped BaPu with commodity hardware. Our extensive experiments shows that despite TCP's sensitivity to typical channel factors such as high wireless packet loss, out-of-order packets arrivals due to multipath, heterogeneous backhaul capacity, and dynamic delays, BaPu achieves a backhaul aggregation up to 95% of the theoretical maximum throughput for UDP and 88% for TCP. We also empirically estimate the potential idle bandwidth that can be harnessed from residential broadband.