Fair WLAN Backhaul Aggregation

Aggregating multiple 802.11 Access Point (AP) backhauls using a single-radio WLAN card has been considered as a way of bypassing the backhaul capacity limit. However, cur-rent AP aggregation solutions greedily maximize the indi-vidual station throughput without taking fairness into ac-count. This can lead to grossly unfair throughput distribu-tions, which can discourage user participation and severely limit commercial deployability. Motivated by this problem, we present THEMIS, a single-radio station that performs multi-AP backhaul aggregation in a fair and distributed way, without requiring any change in the network. We implement THEMIS on commodity hardware, evaluate it extensively through controlled exper-imental tests, and validate it in a deployment spanning 3 floors of a multistory building. THEMIS is being used in a commercial trial by a major broadband provider to its customers