Publication Data
Juggler: Virtual Networks for Fun and Profit
Abstract: There are many situations in which an additional network
interface—or two—can provide benefits to a mobile user. Additional interfaces can
support parallelism in network flows, improve handoff times, and provide sideband
communication with nearby peers. Unfortunately, such benefits are outweighed by the
added costs of an additional physical interface. Instead, virtual interfaces have been
proposed as the solution, multiplexing a single physical interface across more than one
communication endpoint. However, the switching time of existing implementations is too
high for some potential applications, and the benefits of this approach to real
applications are not yet clear. This paper directly addresses these two shortcomings.
It describes a link-layer implementation of a virtual 802.11 networking layer, called
Juggler, that achieves switching times of approximately 3 ms, and less than 400 \mu{\rm
s} in certain conditions. We demonstrate the performance of this implementation on
three application scenarios. By devoting 10 percent of the duty cycle to background
tasks, Juggler can provide nearly instantaneous handoff between base stations or
support a modest sideband channel with peer nodes, without adversely affecting
foreground throughput. Furthermore, when the client issues concurrent network flows,
Juggler is able to assign these flows across more than one AP, providing significant
speedup when wired-side bandwidth from the AP constrains end-to-end performance.
