booster

Abstract

While more and more people today have a fast Internet connection, there are plenty of other people that do not. The aim of this project is to create a solution that combines multiple Internet access points (LTE, ADSL) into one single tunable network connection.

Who might be interested in this project?

We're trying to solve one by one some real usecases, either things that came up to our mind or requested features from the community. If you think that you have a problem that booster may solve, you're highly encouraged to either contact us ([email protected]) or to file a new feature request!

Gamers

Having lag or jitter problems (e.g. ping that is not constant over time, check this out for clarifications). With booster we want to "reserve" a slice of the overall network channel for the game beign played to provide a smooth gaming experience, while using the rest of the bonded network connection for the other actions, such as Window's background auto-updates, or maybe watching a movie over the network (issue #41).

Travellers/Slow ADLS owners

Having problems downloading/uploading data over the Internet. For example when you find yourself at your friend's place, you want to watch a movie together but the ADSL at his/her home is too slow. With booster we can bond the ADSL, both your and your friend's LTE networks, apply rules on how the different sources are drained, and provide a faster network access point.

booster already shows benefits for solving this usecase: without booster our offices WIFI's download speed reaches ~34Mbps, but with booster, using both @philip's and my phone's mobile network connection we managed to obtain ~155Mbps! 🎉 (issue #42).

Creative people

That want to get involved, have some feedback, know something that might be helpful.. in any case you're very welcome! 😊

How does it work?

In short words, when booster spawns, it identifies the network interfaces available in the system that provide an active internet connection. It then starts a socks5 proxy server. According to some particular strategy (still not configurable), and a set of policies (configurable), the server is able to distribute the incoming network traffic across the collected network interfaces.

Installation

(Windows is not yet supported)

Binary

Pick your release.

Snap

Note: at the moment booster is not able to bind to an interface that points to an Apple device without root privileges. To overcome the issue install the snap as root. You can always inspect the logs using:

snap logs booster -f

From source

First install go, then type this commands into your command line:

git clone https://github.com/booster-proj/booster.git && cd booster # Clone
make test # Test
make # Build

Usage

booster runs as daemon when installed through snap, otherwise you'll have to start it manually:

bin/booster server

Note: get help with the --help flag.

Once started, booster can be remotely controller through its public HTTP Json API. The documentation is available in the Wiki.