A Case for Enhancing Dual Radio Repeater Performance Through Striping, Aggregation, and Channel Sharing

Abstract

The work in this paper is a systematic research and engineering effort in exploring the design space of multi-interface wireless re- peater systems. We present the design, implementation and evalu- ation of a wireless repeater system, Multifacet, which opportunis- tically utilizes multiple interfaces to enhance capacity. The system is designed to be transparent to application endpoints and does not need any end application modifications for adoption. Multifacet incorporates several techniques to achieve efficient bandwidth uti- lization across multiple interfaces – (a) coordinated channel shar- ing, (b) a simplified backpressure based striping technique, (c) a single link abstraction, and (d) the ability to seamlessly migrate a client to the optimal channel. Multifacet is implemented on off- the-shelf dual band wireless repeater and demonstrates high speeds (337 Mbps) operation. On average, Multifacet performs 50% better than traditional AP/repeater setups, and in the best case, more than 2⇥ better.