Multi-Technology Bus-To-Infrastructure Wireless Networks: A Multipath Transfer Solution

Welcome

This website aims to present an overview of the project developed in the MSc dissertation "Multi-Technology Bus-To-Infrastructure Wireless Networks: A Multipath Transfer Solution", as well as all the documentation regarding the development and implementation of the proposed solution.

Abstract

In the last decade, we witnessed an increasing demand for Internet services available anytime, anywhere. People want to be able to use services such as social networks, VoIP, e-mail, among others, in the most tedious periods of their daily life, such as when travelling in public transports. Hence, it seems natural that, in recent years, there has been an increasing offer of Internet services, via Wi-Fi, to the passengers of public transports.

The project developed in this dissertation is motivated by the SITMe project, whose main goal is to provide Internet services via Wi-Fi to bus passengers, among other services, such as news and entertainment information, and geo-referenced interactive services. Each bus is able to use multiple wireless technologies, such as UMTS and Wi-Fi, to connect to the network infrastructure, but currently only supports the usage of one network interface at a time, chosen according to defined metrics.

The main goal of this dissertation was to develop a multipath transfer solution that is able to simultaneously use the available network interfaces to provide intelligent traffic distribution and load-balancing (based on defined link metrics and type of traffic), which results in a better usage of the properties of each network link, as well as higher aggregated bandwidth and fault-tolerance in the system's network.

The main goals of this project were achieved resulting in the development of a new Multipath Transfer Solution. A series of tests were performed to the developed solution, in order to assess its performance, which resulted in very favorable results. Such results led to the conclusion that the developed solution has the potential to bring a substantial improvement to the SITMe project.