Robust Rate Control for Heterogeneous Network Access in Multi-Homed Environments

The authors investigate a novel robust flow control framework for heterogeneous network access by devices with multi-homing capabilities. Towards this end, the authors develop an optimal control formulation for allocating rates to devices on multiple access networks with heterogeneous time-varying characteristics. Analysis and design allow for the coupling between different devices to be relaxed by treating the dynamics for each device as independent of the others. Thus, the distributed end-to-end rate control scheme proposed in this work relies on minimum information and achieves fair and robust rate allocation for the devices. An efficient utilization of the access networks is established through an equilibrium analysis in the static case. They perform measurement tests to collect traces of the available bandwidth on various WLANs and Ethernet.