Improving User's Experience through Simultaneous Multi-WLAN Connections

Abstract: In highly-dense IEEE 802.11 deployments, areas covered by multiple Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs) will be common. This opens the door for stations equipped with multiple IEEE 802.11 interfaces to use several WLANs simultaneously, which not only may improve user experience, achieving a better connection with higher throughput and resilience; but it may also improve the network utilization. In this paper we investigate such a scenario. First, using a test-bed, consisting of a single station equipped with two interfaces and two access points, we observe that the file transfer time between the station and a destination server can be significantly reduced, studying with special attention the case in which both links do not have the same available bandwidth. Then, using a Markovian model that captures the scenario's dynamics in presence of multiple stations, we observe that in addition to improve individual station's performance, we can also improve the utilization of a multi-Access Points network despite increasing the contention level.