3GOL: Power-boosting ADSL using 3G OnLoading

Presenter: Vijay Erramilli
Authors: Claudio Rossi (Politecnico di Torino), Narseo Vallina-Rodriguez (Univ. of Cambridge), Vijay Erramilli (Telefonica Research), Yan Grunenberger (Telefonica Research), Laszlo Gyarmati (Telefonica Research), Nikolaos Laoutaris (Telefonica Research), Rade Stanojevic (Telefonica Research), Konstantina Papagiannaki (Telefonica Research), Pablo Rodriguez (Telefonica Research)

The authors propose a very innovative idea: selectively onload a part of the traffic from the wired network onto the wireless network in order to overcome slow ADSL connections at home.
Yes, you have well understood! The authors propose to onload rather offload data to the cellular network!

Of course there are many challenges to be faced and the authors prove the feasibility of the proposed solution  by measuring the capacity available on the cellular network, by trace driven analysis and by studying the problem of data caps on cellular data connections.

A fully application level prototype is implemented and evaluated in the wild in residential environment with two bandwidth hungry applications: VoD and picture upload. Up to a 4x speedup is obtained for downlink and up to 6x speedup for uplink, which demonstrate the great potential of this proposal, which is fully over-the-top. The solution is also compared with MPTCP achieving better result.

However, a network integrated solution is needed to apply this proposal at scale without harming the existing traffic on the cellular network.

This very novel and challenging idea is worth a read!