Rateless codes for heterogeneous in-home interfaces aggregation

With the appearance of P2P networks and the rapid progress in the technologies used to setup in-home networks, these have recently elicited much interest between the industry and the scientific community. Nowadays, there are several alternatives that could be used to establish an in-home network and it is very common that various of these technologies were available in homes and small offices. Therefore, an application able to combine two or more of these interfaces should be very useful in these networks. The Linux Kernel contains a driver (or module) called Bonding that permits Ethernet interfaces aggregation. However, it is not prepared for asymmetric interfaces aggregation and even less for variable capacity technologies, like PLC. In this work a variation of the bonding module is presented. This new module works properly in asymmetric scenarios by using Rateless Codes. © 2011 IEEE.