Is a Raspberry Pi WiFi aggregator possible?

[LucidEye]

Back in around 2007, there was a guy building and selling a device called "The Slurpr" wifi link aggregator.
Here's an article with some of the specs...

http://www.geektechnique.org/projectlab ... boxes.html

This device used 6 PCMCIA wifi cards connected to a mini-motherboard and a router board.
Using it's 6 radios, it could connect to several individual wifi access points, and then combine their multiple bandwidths into a single fast connection.

Does anyone know if it would be possible to do this with a Raspberry Pi model 2 ?

The Raspberry Pi 2's quad core CPU and 1GB onboard memory seem like they would be able to handle the job... especially with stable overclocking up to 1100MHz

I was also curious if, since running headless, the GPU could be utilized in any way for handling some of the load. (It too can be overclocked to 450MHz)

Also, by using a large (say 128GB) SD boot card, unused space could be utilized as more "router memory" or data cache?

I was thinking about a headless configuration using 4 USB WiFi dongles as the "colectors" and outputting the combined bandwidth to the Pi's ethernet port.

Connection to this "WiFi aggrigator" could simply be done via SSH or even a web interface.

If anyone knows if or how this could be done I would very much appreciate some pointers or links to other people who may be working on something like this... I tried various google searches, but didn't turn up anything but The Slrupr.

Hope someone can help, thanks.

[Tom_A]

Bottleneck on that is going to be the USB interface that also runs the ethernet. Given the speed that wifi runs now, I guess you'd be at the limit no matter how much you overclocked with two wifi dongles. You'd have better luck with one of the small form factor PCs like a NUC or Giga Brix that had USB 3 and built in wifi card as well.

[mikerr]

Why not ? Pi is all about experimentation for me...




would help if I powered that hub


On bandwidth: I rarely get more than 2-3meg/sec (20Mbps) out of wifi, but can max out the pi's 100Mbps (10meg/sec) ethernet,
so that gives scope for at least a few wifi dongles before the whole thing maxes out. (USB2 bandwidth of 480Mbps total)
- yes its a bit of a nutz idea, but...

[Tom_A]

For experimentation purposes, I'm sure it's possible. Almost everything that will run on a higher power desktop will run, possibly in some limited way. People set up web servers all the time just for testing and then move to a higher power server once the issues are worked out. I think the wifi dongle I'm using is doing better than that for speed. It's a Panda Wireless 300Mb/s dongle.

I'm assuming that you already know how to get more than one dongle connected and working and just need the part that distributes bandwidth between all of them. I'm a bit confused as to how you will be using the output. What does the Ethernet connect to?