International Journal on AdHoc Networking Systems (IJANS) Vol. 5, No.

3, July 2015

A CELLULAR BONDING AND ADAPTIVE LOAD

BALANCING BASED MULTI-SIM GATEWAY FOR
MOBILE AD HOC AND SENSOR NETWORKS
Francesco Beritelli, Aurelio La Corte, Corrado Rametta and Francesco Scaglione
Dipartimento di Ingegneria Elettrica Elettronica e Informatica, University of Catania,
Italy

ABSTRACT
As it is well known, the QoS(quality of service) provided by mobile Internet access point devices is far from
the QoS level offered by the common ADSL modem-router due to several reasons: in fact, mobile Internet
access networks are not designed to support real-time data traffic because of several drawbacks
concerning the wireless medium such as resource sharing, traffic congestion, radio link coverage etc.,
which impact directly such parameters as delay, jitter, and packet loss rate that are strictly connected to
the quality of user experience. The main scope of the present paper is to introduce a dual USIM HSPA
gateway for ad hoc and sensors networks thanks to which it will be possible to guarantee a QoS suitable
for a series of network-centric application such as real-time communications and monitoring, video
surveillance, real-time sensor networks, telemedicine, vehicular and mobile sensor networks and so on. The
main idea is to exploit multiple radio access networks in order to enhance the available end-to-end
bandwidth and the perceived quality of experience. The scope has been reached by combining multiple
radio access with dynamic load balancing and the VPN (virtual private network) bond technique.

KEYWORDS
Mobile Internet Access, Multiple RAN, Cellular Bonding, VPN Bonding, Dynamic Load Balancing, Smart
Hot Spotting.

1.INTRODUCTION
The rapid and continuous consolidation of Mobile Internet access request together with the
significant increase of mobile services provided by third- and fourth generation (3G, HSPA, LTE)
networks, have recently created the conditions for a considerable expansion of mobile IP
applications and services. Mobile IP networks are not designed to support real-time and/or timecritical traffic because of several drawbacks concerning the wireless medium[1]: resource
sharing, traffic congestion, radio link coverage etc., which impact directly such parameters as
delay, jitter, and packet losses. These are the main causes of quality degradation of numerous
services over the PSTN (public switched telephone network). Some authors of this work proposed
the use of multiple SIM (subscriber identity module) devices in order to improve the QoS offered
by the cellular radio access technology [2][3][4][5]. Following this paradigm, in the present
paper, the authors propose a multiple SIM device, acting as:

1. sink of a wireless sensor network[6], ad hoc network or Internet of Things

network[7];
2. gateway between the local wireless domain (ZigBee, Bluetooth, 802.11 ad-hoc
mode) and the wide area network domain (radio access domain 3G or 4G).
DOI : 10.5121/ijans.2015.5301

International Journal on AdHoc Networking Systems (IJANS) Vol. 5, No. 3, July 2015

The main idea consists in enhancing the connectivity between the local area network (ad hoc,
sensors, IoT, etc.) domain and a remote command and control node by exploiting the VPNs bond
of two cellular radio access connections coupled with an adaptive load balancing algorithm based
on real time evaluation of the available end-to-end bandwidth offered by two different network
operators. The authors propose a trivial prototype in order to evaluate the effectiveness of the
proposed solution in terms of the enhancement of both the instantaneous available bandwidth and
connection availability between the mobile access point and a remote command and control
and/or monitoring node. As to the costs/benefits balance, the proposed method on the one hand
requires a dual RF module, but on the other hand it is also true that nowadays HSPA or LTE
modems have become very cheap and common and there are a lot of free and open source
operative systems allowing the implementation of advanced networking functions such as load
balancing techniques, VPN creation and bonding, network performance evaluation and so on.
The paper is structured as follows: Section II describes the possible applications and contexts
where the proposed approach can offer considerable benefits in terms of reliability and efficiency
and gives an overview on the overall system; Section III presents the end-to-end bandwidth
measurement algorithm and the adaptive weight assignment procedure; Section IV reports the
performance results of a real test bed; finally, in Section V conclusions are drawn.

2. SCENARIO AND SYSTEM OVERVIEW

This paragraph provides a brief overview of both the application scenario and the proposed
mechanism based on two key features, the VPN bond between two cellular connections and the
adaptive load balancing between the available radio access connections.

2.1 Application scenario

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) and Internet of Things (IoT)have become very commonly used
technologies enabling a large number of applications and services in everyday life. Usually the
architecture of the above cited networks is based on a certain number of sensors and devices that
communicate among them and towards a critical device called sink that has the scope of
collecting data from the devices for monitoring, control, statistics, etc. Often the sink is designed
to communicate via Internet to a remote command and control (C2) position where a user can
operate over the network.

Access
Network
1

Access
Network
2

CORE NETWORK

Figure1. Scenario overview.

International Journal on AdHoc Networking Systems (IJANS) Vol. 5, No. 3, July 2015

With this scope, the sink provides the functionality of gateway with the external IP world.
Regarding this aspect, the gateway is equipped with at least two network interfaces: the first is
usually a WiFi card operating as access point or a Bluetooth interface acting as master of the ad
hoc network or a ZigBee card operating as sink of the sensors network; the second one is a wide
area network interface like as wifi-mesh mode, 3G/4G modem, WiMaX or other PMR (private
mobile radio) cards in order to communicate with the IP worldaccording to the applicative
scenario for which the ad hoc network has been conceived. In particular, when the sensor network
or the IoT network are deployed for command and/or control, monitoring, surveillance or similar
use in mobile or vehicular contexts and a fixed wide area network connection is not available, it is
mandatory to provide a stable, reliable and effective wireless connection towards the remote
server in order to guarantee the required QoS for time-critical and real time applications.
With this aim the authors propose a Dual SIM 3G/4G wireless access point that acts as the sink
for the sensors or ad-hoc network and, at the same time, acts as gateway towards the IP core
network. To guarantee QoS for time critical and real time applications, the proposed device offers
two main features:
1) a VPN bonding between the two radio access connections, thanks to which it is possible
to obtain a bandwidth almost equal to the sum of the two available end-to-end
bandwidths;
2) a dynamic load balancing algorithm, which is a process that establishes the weights the
device gives to the two different radio connections during the movement of the mobile
sink/gateway on the base of the instantaneous available end-to-end bandwidth offered by
the two different network operators.
It has been observed that in this first phase of the present research the weights are established in
order to maximize the cumulative bandwidth but as a future work the authors will implement a
more complex algorithm able to dynamically calculate the VPN weights based on the traffic
typology (voice, file transfer, best effort, etc) and the related parameters that directly impact on
the quality of experience of the end user willing to use the service.

2.2 System at a glance

The smart gateway proposed by the authors is based on a well known technique called VPNs
bond, usually employed in the Ethernet switch and extended to the cellular domain to counteract
some drawbacks connected to the radio access technology. Due to the application of VPNs bond
it is possible to balance the data load among the available network interfaces but, for the sake of
clarity, it should be highlighted that this technique is much more flexible if compared to the
common load balancing algorithms; in fact, the latter permit to split the data connection between
the source and the destination by using the available connections and according to the weights
assigned to each interface. In such a way, the effectiveness of the mechanism is obtained only
when there are more than one end-to-end connection between the sender and the receiver. In case
there is only a data flow towards the remote server, load balancing permits to assign the data
stream to one of the two connections and the perceived end-to-end bandwidth is equal to the one
offered by the best network operator. Instead, the use of the VPNs bond technique permits to
enhance the available end-to-end bandwidth also in the case of only one data flow from the
source node, i.e. the gateway of the ad hoc network, and the destination, i.e. the remote command
and control position.

International Journal on AdHoc Networking Systems (IJANS) Vol. 5, No. 3, July 2015

Figure 2. VPNs bond architecture.

The VPNs bonding consists in unifying two or more layer 2 connections in order to be able to
assign to one data flow a bandwidth ideally equal to the sum of the bandwidth offered by single
L2 connections. This technique is well known and widely employed in the field of Ethernet
switches where it is possible to unify two or more L2 interfaces to guarantee a larger point
point-topoint bandwidth in the core network.
In the present use case, the procedure consists in the creation of a VPN between each 3G/4G
interface
ace and the end point of the communication, i.e. the remote server. Once established the two
VPNs it is possible to make the bonding of the latter in order to establish a large bandwidth
connection between source and destination nodes (see Figure 2). Usually
Usually the VPNs bond
technique is coupled with a trivial load balancing algorithm that consists in assigning static and
equal weights to each L2 connection. In case of L2 switches or DSL modem/routers this approach
represents a good solution because the network
network conditions are similar for each interface and they
remain almost constant in time. Let us suppose that the two available connections provide a
bandwidth equal to 2 Mbps; in such a case a trivial load balancer will assign weights equal to 1 to
each connection
tion and the system will provide a bandwidth equal to 4 Mbps. Now, supposing that
at a time t the connection number 1 provides a bandwidth equal to 2 Mbps whereas the
connection number 2 offers a bandwidth equal to 1 Mbps. Under this condition, if the load
balancing algorithm maintains constant weights, by using a simple round robin mechanism, the
connection 2 will represent a bottleneck for the system because the overall available end
end-to-end
bandwidth will not be equal to the sum of the two bandwidths but it will be equal to twice that of
the worst connection.
In a wireless scenario characterized by the high variability of radio coverage, different traffic
conditions, handover procedures, and mobility, each radio interface equipped with the related
SIM - performs according to the infrastructure and the load conditions set by its operator. Under
these conditions, a static weights assignment would result in a drastic reduction in performance
where the worst connection would act as a bottleneck for the whole
whole system. With the aim of
overcoming this limit, the authors propose a mechanism of real time bandwidth evaluation to
establish each time and for each L2 connection the weights to assign to the VPNs bond, thus
maximizing the transmission rate towards the destination
d
node.
In the next sections the adaptive load balancing algorithm will be described and the first
performance evaluation of a trivial prototype will be presented.
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International Journal on AdHoc Networking Systems (IJANS) Vol. 5, No. 3, July 2015

3. DYNAMIC LOAD BALANCING ALGORITHM

The proposed algorithm can be summarized in three steps:
1. Bandwidth measuremet for each available radio data connection;
2. Results analysis and weight evaluation to establish and set up the VPN bond parameters;
3. Periodic performance evaluation to determinate the most suitable weight for each mobile
connection.
As to the first step, i.e. the end-to-end bandwidth evaluation, it is carried outvia the Self Loading
of Periodic Streams (SloPS) technique[8][9]. The latter is based on a client-server application: the
sender process runs on the multi-SIM access point whereas the receiver process runs on a remote
host,which, in the present architecture, is the remote gathering node of the sensor data network.
The above mentioned architecture is suitable in case the mobile hot spot has to send data towards
a remote sink collecting sensor data; however, if the time-critical application is based on the
transmission from the remote host to the mobile network the upload bandwith will be taken into
consideration. The working principle of the Self Loading of Periodic Streams is very simple: it is
based on the periodic transmission of packet streams from the source to the destination and on the
consequent measure of the One Way Delay (OWD), which is the time interval between the
transmission of the data packet and its reception at the receiver side. The number of packets
transmitted increases until the growing one way delay; when this happens it means that the packet
transmission rate is greater than the available bandwidth provided by the radio access network.
Figure 3 shows the above mentioned procedure: when the transmission rate (R) is compatible
with the available bandwidth (A), i.e. R < A, the one way delay shows an almost constant trend;
however, when the packet rate from the source to the destination is greater than the available
bandwidth, i.e. R > A, the one way delay increases because of the TCP congestion window
mechanism.

Figure 3. One way delay values of the ith packet train in the SLoPS technique[8].

The measurement is obtained by the iterative sending of a series of K packets of L bit each of
which is transmitted during an interval of T seconds. In such a way the transmission rate is equal
to R = L/T [bit/s]. Each packet of the series has a timestamp to indicate when the data packet has
been created and sent to the receiver node. Once the destination node receives the packets stream
it compares the arrival time (Ai) and the sending time (Si) of the packets in order to calculate the
one way delay of the ith stream, i.e. Di = Ai Si.

International Journal on AdHoc Networking Systems (IJANS) Vol. 5, No. 3, July 2015

The sender and the receiver communicate according to the client-server paradigm in order to
establish the available bandwidth. When the one way delay at the destination side increases, in
fact, the receiver process notifies the sender that behaves as follows:
a. If R(i) < A, the source process will send the following packets stream at R(i+1) > R(i)

b. If R(i) > A, the source process will send the following packets stream at R(i+1) < R(i)
Furthermore, the rate of the stream (i+1) is established as follows [9]:
1. Two start parameters, Rmin ed Rmax, are initialized equal to zero and equal to the ideal
maximum throughput provided by the connection Rmax;
o If R(i) < A then Rmin = R(i)
o If R(i) > A then Rmax = R(i)
2. R(i+1) = (Rmax Rmin)/2
3. The iterative process ends when Rmax Rmin< w, where w indicates the value depending
on the precision of the bandwidth evaluation procedure (obviously, the greater the w the
less accurate evaluation but, at the same time, the faster the convergence period required
by the algorithm).
The above mentioned algorithm runs for each radio access connection and converges to the
actually available end-to-end bandwidth. When the process ends, the bandwidth values are
communicated to the adaptive load balancing process that updates the VPNs bond weights as
follows:
a. the VPN weight of the worst connection is set equal to 1;
b. the VPN weight of the best connection is set equal to Abetter / Aworst;

c. in case the bandwidth offered by one of the two operators is equal to 0, e.g. because of a
lack of radio coverage, the whole traffic is routed to the active connection.
The flow diagrams related to the client/server application running in the gateway side and in the
remote command and control node are shown in Figure 4 and Figure 5.

International Journal on AdHoc Networking Systems (IJANS) Vol. 5, No. 3, July 2015

Figure 4. Bandwidth evaluation process at the mobile gateway side.

International Journal on AdHoc Networking Systems (IJANS) Vol. 5, No. 3, July 2015

Figure5. Bandwidth evaluation process at the remote command and control side.

4.PERFORMANCE EVALUATION
In the above sections some problems have been illustrated that arise when a mobile wireless
sensor networks have to be connected to a remote command and control server by using the
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International Journal on AdHoc Networking Systems (IJANS) Vol. 5, No. 3, July 2015

public 3G or 4G radio network. In order to overcome such drawbacks as connection interruption,

lack of bandwidth, delay in performance, jitter and packet loss rate not compatible with time
critical applications, a smart dual SIM sink/gateway based on multiple radio access, VPN
bonding and adaptive load balancing between the available connections is proposed. The present
section will prove the effectiveness of the proposed solution showing the results obtained during
the test bed. For this latter we realized a prototype by using a small form factor system boards
optimized for wireless routing and network applications, an ALIX2D2 board[11], equipped with a
500 MHz AMD Geode LX800 CPU and 256 MB DDR DRAM on board; two USB Internet keys
have been used to provide cellular connectivity and the two devices have been equipped with two
SIMs of two different network operators, that we will define as Operator 1 and Operator 2 in the
following sections; ZeroShell[12] and OpenVPN[13] has been used as operative system and VPN
manager respectively, whereas proprietary scripts has been realized by using bash and python
language to evaluate the available end-to-end bandwidth between the couples source-destination
and, consequently, to establish the weights to assign to each VPN in order to maximize the
overall performance of the prototype. For the aim of clarity, the same hardware and software have
been employed to evaluate the performance of the standard static weights assignment procedure
without using, obviously, the scripts for the dynamic evaluation of the VPN weights. A picture of
the hardware employed to realize our prototype is shown in Figure 6.We performed 15 data
transfers from the mobile sink to the remote C2 evaluating the instantaneous throughput for each
operator and for the one obtained by using the bond of the two VPN without the adaptive load
balancing. It has been observed that the VPNs bond performs better than the two single end-toend connections providing high bandwidth connections between the mobile sensor network and
the remote C2 position.
As shown in Figure 7, the instantaneous end-to-end throughput is not equal to the sum of the two
single ones because of the presence of the overhead related to the establishment of SSH tunnel
among the two radio network interfaces and the remote server.

Figure 6. The prototype employed during our test bed.

International Journal on AdHoc Networking Systems (IJANS) Vol. 5, No. 3, July 2015

Figure 7. Available bandwidth perceived by a single TCP connection.

Figure8. Average end-to-end bandwidth comparison.

To summarize (refer to Figure 8), the use of a dual SIM sink/gateway permits to enhance the
available end-to-end bandwidth by more than 50% if compared to the best radio operator,
Operator 1, and more than 100% if compared to the worst radio operator in our test bed Operator
2.
Obviously, the use of two or more network accesses guarantees a seamless connectivity between
the source and the destination if compared to the use of only one radio interface. Figure 9 shows
the instantaneous bandwidth of the two network connections and the VPN bond; as it appears
when one of the two operators goes down due to network congestion or lack of radio coverage the
VPN bond performs as the only working operator and the prototype behaves every time like a
common single stream device equipped with the USIM belonging to the best network operator,
i.e. the operator offering the best connectivity at the given time.
The performance delivered by the VPN bond coupled with the static load balancing between the
two available connections is satisfactory in the above mentioned scenarios; however, this
technique has some drawbacks when one of the two operators does not go down but, more
simply, offers an end-to-end bandwidth variety during the sink movement due to such reasons as
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International Journal on AdHoc Networking Systems (IJANS) Vol. 5, No. 3, July 2015

radio coverage, traffic congestion, handover procedures and so on. It can appear that during the
sink movement the network operator 2 delivers almost constant performance whereas the network
operator 1 shows a drastic reduction in the bandwidth see Figure 10). In such a case, the VPN
bond and the static load balancing algorithm does not perform as expected and the dual SIM
gateway behaves as the worst of the two network operators; in fact, the load balancing algorithm
splits into two equal flows, the original one assigning to each connection the amount of data to
transmit equal to the available bandwidth offered by the worst operator.

Figure 9. Available bandwidth perceived by a single TCP connection during Operator 2 failure.

Figure10. Available bandwidth perceived by a single TCP connection during Operator 1 bandwidth
degradation in case of static weights.

Figure 10 shows the performance delivered by using the connections offered by Operator 1,
Operator 2 and the traditional VPN bond technique respectively. As shown in the figure, the dual
SIM prototype behaviour is similar to that of the worst operator; the latter representing, in fact,
the bottleneck of the system. In such a case, the VPN bond coupled with the load balancing does
not offer any performance enhancement because of the incorrect assignment of bond weights.
Figure 11, instead, indicates the results obtained by the proposed cellular bonding prototype with
the use of an adaptive load balancing algorithm in order to counteract the drawbacks related to the
variability of the end-to-end bandwidth offered by each radio operator during the movement of
the mobile sink/gateway. The mobile sink/gateway was moved following the same route. It
appears that the cellular bonding almost always outperforms the best cellular operator; however,
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International Journal on AdHoc Networking Systems (IJANS) Vol. 5, No. 3, July 2015

when this does not happen it is due to the convergence time of the adaptive weights algorithms.
Also,this case highlights that the final end-to-end bandwidth is not equal to the sum of all
bandwidths because of the presence of the overhead due to the implementation of the VPNs and
their bonding. In the Figure 12 the behaviour of static and dynamic weights is presented, whereas
in the Figure 13 the average end-to-end bandwidth of the two schemes is compared. As we can
see, the VPN bond with adaptive weights assignment outperforms the static assignment scheme
by almost 100% showing the effectiveness of the proposed solution in vehicular applications such
as telemedicine, telemetry, remote command and control, etc.

Figure 11. Available bandwidth perceived by a single TCP connection during Operator 1 bandwidth
degradation in case of adaptive weights.

Figure12. Bandwidth comparison between VPNs bond with static and dynamic weights.

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International Journal on AdHoc Networking Systems (IJANS) Vol. 5, No. 3, July 2015

Figure13. Average bandwidth comparison between VPNs bond with static and dynamic weights.

5.CONCLUSION
The present paper proposes a smart gateway for mobile wireless sensor networks, IoT networks
or local area networks for time critical or real time communications based on two approaches, the
VPNs bonding and the dynamic load balancing between the available radio access connections.
The first approach permits to enhance the available end-to-end bandwidth and the reliability of
the connection between the sink and the remote position; the second step consists in the dynamic
weights calculation to be assigned to each connection in order to maximize the cumulative endto-end bandwidth. In fact, Mobile IP networks are not designed to support real-time and/or timecritical traffic because of several drawbacks concerning the wireless medium, such as resources
sharing, traffic congestion, radio link coverage etc., which impact directly such parameters as
bandwidth, delay, jitter, and packet losses that are the main causes of quality degradation of
numerous services over the PSTN. Under this condition, the dynamic assignment of the weight to
each connection of the VPN bonding plays a key role in exploiting the best connection available
at the given time. Performance evaluation of the prototype shows the effectiveness of our
approach in terms of instantaneous throughput. Considering the future work, the authors of the
present paper are currently working on a device that is able to calculate the dynamic weights of
the load balancing algorithm based on the kind of data traffic the sink/gateway has to transmit or
receive from the remote command and control station.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This work has been partially supported by the "ProgrammaOperativoNazionale
Ricerca&Competitivit 2007-2013 within the project "PON04a2_E SINERGREEN RES
NOVAE Smart Energy Master per ilgovernoenergetico del territorio and the project
PON01_00683
- SIGMA - Sistema Integrato di sensori in ambiente cloud
perlaGestioneMultirischioAvanzata.

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International Journal on AdHoc Networking Systems (IJANS) Vol. 5, No. 3, July 2015

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Authors
Francesco Beritelli received the Laurea degree in Electronic Engineering and the Ph.D.
degree in Electronics, Computer Science, and Telecommunications Engineering from the
University of Catania, Catania, Italy, in 1993 and in 1997, respectively. From 1997 to
2000 in collaboration with CSELT (now Telecom Italia LAB) he took an active part in
international ITU-T standardization meetings. From 1998 he is the founding member of
the Multimedia Technologies Institute - MTI, applied research laboratory operating in
DSP (Digital Signal Processor) and CTI (Computer Telephony Integration) applications.
Currently, from 2002, he is Assistant Professor in the Department of Electric, Electronic and Computer
Science Engineering at the University of Catania. His main research activities are in the area of robust
audio and speech signal classification and recognition, variable bit-rate speech coding, and adaptive-rate
voice and dual stream transmission for mobile IP telephony applications. His interests also include the field
of biometric identification and cardiac signal processing. He is a member of the Institute of Electrical and
Electronic Engineers (IEEE) and the IEEE Signal Processing Society since 1996 and has 100 scientific
publications, mainly in international journals, books and conference proceedings.
Aurelio La Cortereceived the M.Sc. degree in electrical engineering from the University
of Catania in 1988, and the Ph.D. in Electronic Engineering and Computer Science in 1994.
From 1994 he is at the University of Catania. He is an associate professor in
Telecommunication Engineering. His scientific interests include network and QoS
management techniques, risk analysis of ICT systems, bio-inspired models for information
security, protocols and architecture for integrated communications.

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International Journal on AdHoc Networking Systems (IJANS) Vol. 5, No. 3, July 2015

CorradoRametta received the Laurea degree in Electronic Engineering and the Ph.D.
degree in Computer Science and Telecommunications Engineering from the University of
Catania, Italy, in 2008 and in 2012, respectively. From 2009 to 2012, he was a Research
Engineer in
the field
of
wireless communications with the
CNIT
(ConsorzioNazionaleInteruniversitario per le Telecomunicazioni). From 2012 he works as a
post-doc researcher at the University of Catania. His research interests include wireless
mesh networks, ad-hoc and sensor networks, modeling and simulation of communications protocols,
software defined networking, network function virtualization and embedded systems for multimedia
applications.
Francesco Scaglionereceived the Laurea degree in Telecommunications Engineering
from the University of Catania in 2011. His research interests include embedded systems,
VoIP communications and ICT technologies for environmental control and monitoring.

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