Today’s smartphones and user devices are equipped with multiple radio interfaces increasingly. Aggregating theses multiple radio interfaces and using them concurrently will increase a user’s communication speed immediately, but at the expense of increased power consumption. In this paper, we develop a mathematical performance model of an adaptive radio activation scheme by which a radio interface is activated only when needed for performance increase and deactivated otherwise. The developed model shows that the adaptive scheme reduces delay significantly and almost halves power consumption below a certain level of traffic input.

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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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To increase wireless capacity, the concurrent use of multiple wireless interfaces, called aggregation, can be considered. In this paper, we focus on using multiple WiFi interfaces between an access point and a client, and packet-level traffic spreading between interfaces. Two aggregation strategies, link bonding and multipath TCP (MPTCP), are tested and compared in a multi-WiFi radio system with their Linux implementation. Various test conditions such as traffic types, network delay, locations, interface failures, and configuration parameters are considered. Experiment 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) generated by packet reorderings. However, link bonding is better under long network delay and interface failures since it is fast responsive to links’ status changes. 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. Two solutions, delayed ACK and filtering duplicate ACKs, are discussed for further enhancement of link bonding.