Striping Delay-Sensitive Packets over Multiple Bursty Wireless Channels

Gene Cheunga
gene-cs.cheung@hp.com
Puneet Sharmab
puneet@hpl.hp.com
Sung-Ju Leeb
sjlee@hpl.hp.com

aMobile & Media Systems Lab, Hewlett Packard Laboratories, Tokyo, Japan
bMobile & Media Systems Lab, Hewlett Packard Laboratories, Palo Alto, CA

Abstract

Multi-homed mobile devices have multiple wireless communication interfaces, each connecting to the Internet via a low speed and bursty WAN link such as a cellular link. We propose a packet striping system for such multi-homed devices---a mapping of packets by agateway to multiple channels, such that the overall performance is enhanced. We model and analyze the striping of delay-sensitive packets over multiple burst-loss channels. We derive the expected packet loss ratio when FEC (Forward Error Correction) and retransmissions are applied for error protection over multiple channels. We next model and analyze the case when the channels are bandwidth-limited. We develop a dynamic programmingbased algorithm that solves the optimal striping problem for the ARQ, the FEC, and the hybrid FEC/ARQ case.

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