"CUBS: coordinated upload bandwidth sharing in residential networks"   

Enhua Tan, Lei Guo, Songqing Chen, and Xiaodong Zhang 

Proceedings of 17th International Conference on Network Protocols (ICNP 2009),  
Princeton, NJ, October 13-16, 2009.  


Abstract

Millions of residential users are widely served by cable or
DSL connections with modest upload bandwidth and relatively
high download bandwidth. For the increasingly important and
demanding P2P applications such as VoIP, BitTorrent, and
Internet streaming, stable or high upload bandwidth is required.
Inadequate upload bandwidth degrades the performance of
these applications among residential users. On the other hand,
our Internet measurements show that plenty of idle upload
bandwidth (from 50% to 80%) is always available in a local
residential network. Based on this observation, we propose a
system prototype to Coordinate Upload Bandwidth Sharing
(CUBS) among neighboring residential users. Specifically, the
idle upload bandwidth of neighbors can be used upon a request
from a demanding user. Since it has become a common practice
to deploy wireless access points in a residential user¢s home, we
have built CUBS by leveraging the support from the wireless
networks. In CUBS, to discover and manage idle bandwidth,
a localized overlay is constructed by the cooperative users.
CUBS is application independent as the bandwidth sharing is
implemented at the network layer. CUBS is also ISP transparent
because the sharing of neighbors' bandwidth does not demand
any additional bandwidth supplies. We have evaluated the CUBS
system prototype with experiments on Internet. The experimental
results demonstrate that CUBS can effectively improve the
performance of upload intensive applications by more than 30%.