Bonded Wireless Networks: the Gateway to Real-Time Mobile Applications

Real-time mobile applications require reliable wireless communication and usually the major problem is the last mile bottleneck: from the end user to the Internet gateway. To deal with this problem, we implemented a sub-layer between the IP and TCP/UDP layers and named it Layer3.5, which bonds all communication links available to the user and improve the performance: throughput, latency, and reliability. This paper introduces the Layer3.5 architecture and also preliminary evaluation results. For example, we verified that the Layer 3.5 doubles the network throughput when using two LTE routers in parallel. Further, we included also TCP Proxies in our sublayer to deal with TCP performance problems on packet losses in wireless networks. Based on our tests, the the Layer3.5 with only a single LTE router achieves a throughput two times higher than the standard TCP in scenarios with 1% packet error rate. The Layer3.5 guarantees the continuity of services on network problems by switching the network traffic to other links and the TCP/UDP connection is not broken, even when the IP address changes. Further, end user devices and applications benefit from the Layer3.5 immediately, no adaptation are needed, provided the Internet gateway implements this new sub-layer.