A Dynamic Link aggregation Scheme for heterogeneous wireless networks

User Equipments (UEs) are integrated with multiple interfaces to facilitate the usage of various wireless technologies. However, due to the limitations of each technology, expected data rates are not achieved even when the best of available interfaces is chosen for data transfer. Link aggregation is used to aggregate data rates over multiple interfaces for achieving higher data rates. Even though there are multiple link aggregation schemes proposed, they are highly complicated and do not consider dynamics of wireless links. In this paper, we propose a simple and application layer Dynamic Link aggregation Scheme (DLAS) where data can be dynamically transferred through multiple links parallelly or sequentially. We tested the performance of the proposed DLAS schemes in NS-3 simulator and found that DLAS schemes achieve considerable improvement in the data rates in heterogeneous networks comprising of LTE and Wi-Fi technologies. In our experiments for 10 UEs, DLAS achieved 65% improvement in maximum achievable throughput when compared to an existing application layer link aggregation technique.