Wireless Awareness in Heterogeneous Networks

We present a novel architecture for wireless awareness to enhance the performance of network applications in heterogeneous communication environments, where both wired and wireless links exist. Wireless awareness is the capability of network applications to be aware of the existence and characteristics of wireless links. The unique features of this research are: (i) wireless awareness is studied from both the end-host’s and network’s point of view, (ii) network applications can employ the wireless awareness architecture in both proactive and reactive ways to adapt dynamically to the environment, (iii) the wireless awareness architecture is lightweight and scalable. We present several wireless awareness methods: an end-host method by accessing device drivers of network interface cards, a network method by analyzing round-trip times to detect the existence of wireless links, and a network method by processing the inter-packet time to estimate the available bandwidth of wireless links. Experiments with a prototype wireless-aware video-on-demand system exemplify the deployment of the wireless awareness architecture and demonstrate the performance enhancement of network applications using wireless awareness.