Aggregating Internet access in a mesh-backhauled network through MPTCP proxying

Mesh connectivity is part of the 802.11 wireless standards, and many commercial and community wireless networks use meshing as part of their internetwork backhaul. Typically, these networks use L2 or L3 meshing mechanisms to route user traffic along a unique path out of the mesh. Their designs are driven by coverage and wireless capacity concerns, with wired backhaul links assumed to be high capacity. In this work we consider networks in which the wireless mesh links have comparable data-rates to the wired backhaul and ask how users can achieve high data-rates in practice. For these networks, we develop an opportunistic backhaul aggregation technique based on MPTCP and demonstrate it on Linux gateways.