Scalable wlan gateway

Abstract

A technique for combining transmission bandwidths of several mobile stations (MS 1 , MS 2 ) is disclosed. A master mobile station (MS 1 ) establishes ( 7 - 0 ) a WLAN base station communicating with WLAN client terminals (CT). One or more slave mobile stations (MS 2 ) may detect a predefined network identifier and join the WLAN network. The master (MS 1 ) assigns IP addresses for the client terminals (CT) and slave mobile stations (MS 2 ). The master also resolves DNS queries in cooperation with external DNS servers. Traffic, including internet packets (IP 1 -IP 4 ), between the client terminals and various internet hosts ( 110 ) is tunneled over multiple simultaneous transmission paths between the master (MS 1 ) and a multiplexing/demultiplexing computer (SM). The inventive bandwidth combination technique is transparent to the client terminals (CT) and the internet hosts (HO).

1 . A multiplexing/demultiplexing computer comprising:
 a memory for storing applications and data;   a processor for executing the stored applications;   a network interface for providing a communication interface to a data network;   wherein the memory comprises a multiplexing/demultiplexing application which comprises:
 a first code portion for instructing the processor to implement a signaling for discovering one or more master mobile stations; 
 a second code portion for instructing the processor to implement a multiplexing/demultiplexing function for conveying data packets over multiple simultaneous transmission paths such that the multiple simultaneous transmission paths originate and terminate at the multiplexing/demultiplexing computer and a master mobile station and a subset of the multiple simultaneous transmission paths are conveyed via one or more mobile stations which are other than the master mobile station; 
 a third code portion for instructing the processor to implement a network address and port translation function for supporting a connection between a client terminal and a host computer such that a sender address of data packets destined to the host computer is changed to the address of the multiplexing/demultiplexing computer and a recipient address of data packets originated by the host computer is changed to the address of client terminal; 
 a fourth code portion for instructing the processor to implement a domain name service [“DNS”] function for participating in DNS operations with pre-existing internet-based DNS servers.