Potential benefit of flow-based routing in multihomed environments

The data rates provisioned by broadband Internet access connections continue to fall short of the requirements posed by emerging applications. However, the potential of statistical multiplexing of the last mile broadband connections remains unexploited even as the average utilisation of these connections remains low. Despite recent work in this area, two key questions remain unanswered: (a) what is the attainable benefit of broadband access sharing? and (b) how much of this benefit is realisable given real-world constraints? In this work we quantity the attainable benefit of a multihomed broadband access environment by proposing and evaluating several flow-based access sharing policies using a custom flow-based simulator. We then analyse how Much of the performance benefit is lost due to real-world constraints by migrating from simulations to a test-lab environment employing a wireless network. Our results show that in today's broadband Internet access scenarios, a significant reduction in download times (Lip to a factor of 3) is achievable. Copyright (C) 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.