Synergizing wireless communication technologies to improve internet downloading experiences

Considering downloading traffic from the internet, in this paper, we propose a synergized framework (SF), consisting of heterogeneous wireless communication technologies, multi-mode (multi-interface) mobile, and fixed wireless hosts capable of operating over multiple orthogonal (non-overlapping) radio channels, to realize better downloading experiences for users via cooperation between different wireless technologies. An SyNerGized (SNG) routing protocol is devised to enable the proposed framework. Given perceived network information, SNG performs computations based on linear formulations and obtains an optimized route for packet delivery. To adapt to network dynamics, a reactive version of SNG, entitled Reactive SyNerGized (RSNG) routing protocol, is proposed to alleviate the network from constantly keeping track of link capacities within a certain scope of neighborhood. Since the downloading throughput may be bounded by either the internet gateway capacity λ_gw or ad hoc throughput λ_ah, RSNG judiciously propagates Route REQuest (RREQ) until the downloading throughput is bounded by λ_ah over the ad hoc domain, effectively eliminating unnecessary RREQ flooding. Our main objective is to improve achieved user downloading throughput via the cooperative (synergized) communication model and its corresponding routing mechanisms. Simulation results demonstrate the benefits brought by the unified architecture and corroborate the efficacy of the proposed routing techniques.