[Gllug] Bandwidth aggregation techniques

[Mike Brodbelt]

Firstly  - this is a rhetorical question. I don't have 10 ADSL lines,
nor do I think I ever will :-). This was inspired by my noting that BT
will provide 512kbps ADSL up to 5.5km from the exchange, but 2Mbps only
3.5 km from the exchange.

So, if one wanted, for the sake of argument, a 5Mbps connection, one
could get 10 analogue lines provisioned, and then order 512kbps ADSL on
each line. Assume a miracle occurs, and you can get this off BT, and
further, assume that each DSL link terminated on a router, you'd end up
with 10 ethernet interfaces, each capable of 512kbps downstream and
256kbps upstream.

Would it be possible to configure a linux box to bind these together?
I'd envision a machine with 11 ethernet cards - one to a private
network, and the other 10 connected to the 10 routers. Then, you'd want
some kind of software to present those 10 physical interfaces as a
single virtual 5Mpbs interface, and load balance across each of them, as
transparently as possible.

I know there's a bonding driver in the kernel that does some of this,
but it requires that all the slave interfaces terminate on the same
endpoints, whereas I'm interested in a case where only one endpoint is
common. Similarly, multilink PPP has the same limitation.

I've read about "connection teaming", which does not require congruent
endpoints, but offers no advantage to individual requests, and simply
seems to round-robin request between different links.

So, does anyone know if it's possible to transparently aggregate
bandwidth from multiple links without requiring congruent endpoints? I'm
getting the impression from my reading that it can't be done, but I'm
still curious.

Mike.


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