Improving Application QoS with Residential Multihoming

An appealing solution for a networked end host to circumvent last mile congestion is to connect to multiple service providers simultaneously, which is known as multihoming. The differences in peering relationships among different service providers make it possible for multihomed hosts to use significantly different routes to the same destination. Therefore, multihoming can dynamically avoid points of congestion in the network by taking advantage of the choice among different routes available at any given time.

In this paper, we evaluate the potential benefits of residential multihoming for different classes of applications. For Web access applications, we show that response times and download times can be significantly reduced by multihoming, and this is achievable by employing a simple measurement-based switching algorithm. For Voice-over-IP (VoIP) applications, we show via analysis and wide area experiments that perceived voice quality, as quantified by the Mean Opinion Score (MOS) metric, can be improved with a combination of multihoming and forward error correction coding. Finally, for video streaming applications, performance improvements can be realized by splitting video sessions over multiple physical links and migrating sessions to non-congested paths. Collectively, these results suggest that multihoming can be an effective solution to provide quality of service for diverse classes of Internet applications for residential users.