Performance evaluation of backhaul bandwidth aggregation using a partial sharing scheme

To cope with the increasing demand of mobile devices and the limited capacity of cellular networks mobile connections are offloaded to WiFi. The access capacity is further increased, by aggregating bandwidth of WiFi access links. To analyze the performance of aggregated access links we model the most simple case of two cooperating systems interchanging capacities using an offloading scheme. The resulting analytic model is computed by means of a two-dimensional birth and death process. It can be used to seamlessly evaluate the performance of systems between partitioning and complete sharing. This allows to optimize the setting of thresholds dependent on the load of the cooperating system. Furthermore the benefit of aggregating bandwidth in different scenarios with homogeneous and heterogeneous workloads is quantified and the performance of more than two cooperating systems is evaluated by simulation.