To increase wireless capacity, the concurrent use of multiple wireless interfaces on different frequency bands, called aggregation, can be considered. In this paper, we focus on aggregation of multiple Wi-Fi interfaces with packet-level traffic spreading between the interfaces. Two aggregation schemes, link bonding and multipath TCP (MPTCP), are tested and compared in a dualband Wi-Fi radio system with their Linux implementation. Various test conditions such as traffic types, network delay, locations, interface failures and configuration parameters are considered. Experimental results show that aggregation increases throughput performance significantly over the use of a single interface. Link bonding achieves lower throughput than MPTCP due to duplicate TCP acknowledgements (ACKs) resulting from packet reordering and filtering such duplicate ACKs out is considered as a possible solution. However, link bonding is fast responsive to links’ status changes such as a link failure. It is shown that different combinations of interface weights for packet spread in link bonding result in different throughput performance, envisioning a spatio-temporal adaptation of the weights. We also develop a mathematical model of power consumption and compare the power efficiency of the schemes applying different power consumption profiles.

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