Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) technology is being globally adopted in anyone's house as a must-have connectivity medium for our daily life. Driven by the market needs, subsequent WLAN protocol standards have be defined for medium access control and physical layer. IEEE released the original 802.11 protocol, RFC5416 in 1997 and up to six more versions have been published until then aimed to increase both the capacity and the signal coverage distance. In 2014, 802.11ad is published to provide a theoretical maximum data throughput of up to 7.0 Gbps.
Opposite of the fast WLAN technology development, consumer broadband Internet access technologies is experimenting a notable slowing down in new breakthroughs. The new ADSL2++ (52.0 Mbps downstream rate) is still in development after the last ADSL2+, RFC4706, version release in 2008. Although the fiber technology provides an alternative, the higher infrastructure deployment cost makes it less attractive for ISPs.
Motivated by the current trend in technology development and the economic incentives, new communication architecture designs have been proposed to combine existing WLAN and broadband technologies. The new combined solutions provide higher performance without requiring any new infrastructure deployments. For instance, Domenico Giustiniano et al “Fair WLAN Backhaul Aggregation”[1] proposed a client-based solution to aggregate the WLAN backhaul capacity with a virtualized WIFI antenna that is able to connect simultaneously to multiple APs. Such virtualized antenna enables WIFI devices (e.g.: laptop or phones) to connect with multiples APs at same time. Nevertheless, such antenna virtualization requires chipset support and specific driver development per device, which involves high and prohibitive costs in a massive adoption. [1] “Fair WLAN Backhaul Aggregation”, Domenico Giustiniano, Eduard Goma, Alberto Lopez Toledo, P. Rodriguez, ACM/MOBICOM'10, September 2010.
Patent application WO 2013/011088 proposes to aggregate backhaul capacities in an Access Point (AP) enabling one single-radio AP to behave both as a AP for home users and as a client of other neighboring APs that could be in different WALN channels. In order to connect to the neighboring APs, it was proposed to use Network Allocation Vector (NAV) to silence all clients, so have time to switch to other APs for data exchange.
In one hand, AP-based solutions have the advantage of providing backhaul aggregation without any modification in clients. In other hand, it involves remarkable coordination and planning challenges. For instance, each AP has to decide which neighbor APs should aggregate with. Allow all AP to collaborate with all neighboring APs is not a practical solution because it can degrade the performance of all involved WLAN networks. For instance, in WO 2013/011088 APs can switch off all neighboring WLANs by control frames. On more practical solution may be allocating all APs in the same channel, so avoid unnecessary switching offs. Such a solution, however, limits the total capacity of different neighboring WLANs and suffers WIFI well known problem in performance degradation because higher number of devices or long-distanced WIFI clients.
Patent EP-B1-2263398 proposes a routing scheme for mesh-network where multiples relay nodes are interconnected to access the Internet. The proposed scheme computes the best routing and bandwidth allocation according the collected network information. Similarly, U.S. Pat. No. 8,442,003 proposes to use information from different access points and backhaul throughput to select the best access point in a mesh-network. On contrary, present invention is focused on WLAN backhaul aggregation platforms and there are not relay nodes. Each of the nodes in the present invention has independent backhaul connection and the goal is optimize the overall utilization of all backhaul links.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,772,199 describes a QoS management framework where QoS information is broadcasted by different nodes with management frames in a mesh-network. Although QoS management is important for the well-functioning of the proposed aggregation scheme, present invention does not provide any QoS management. Thus U.S. Pat. No. 6,772,199 could be totally complementary to present invention.
In the context of mesh-network, there are also proposals related to transmission control, such as patent application WO-A2-2007/103891 where frameworks define when and how devices access the communication medium. The same problem is also inherent in present invention proposal and other WIFI-based systems. WO-A2-2007/103891 does also apply to present invention proposal.
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