Link-alike: using wireless to share network resources in a neighborhood

Asymmetric broadband connections in the home provide a limited upstream pipe to the Internet. This limitation makes various applications, such as remote backup and sharing high definition video, impractical. However, homes in a neighborhood often have high bandwidth wireless networks, whose bandwidth exceeds that of a single wired uplink. Moreover, most (wired and wireless) connections are idle most of the time. In this paper, we examine the fundamental requirements of a system that aggregates upstream broadband connections in a neighborhood using wireless communication between homes. A scheme addressing this problem must operate efficiently in an environment that is: i) highly lossy; ii) broadcast in nature; and iii) half-duplex. We propose a novel scheme, Link-alike, that addresses those three challenges using opportunistic wireless reception, a novel wireless broadcast rate control scheme, and preferential use of the wired downlink. Through analytical and experimental evaluation, we demonstrate that our approach provides significantly better throughput than previous solutions based on TCP or UDP unicast.