Channel bonding

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Channel bonding in computer networking is an arrangement in which two or more network interfaces on a host computer are combined for redundancy or increased throughput.

On Ethernet interfaces, channel bonding requires assistance from both the Ethernet switch and the host computer's operating system, which must "stripe" the delivery of frames across the network interfaces in the same manner that I/O is striped across disks in a RAID array. For this reason, channel bonding is sometimes also called RAIN, or "redundant array of independent network interfaces".

Multiple dialup links over POTS can be channel-bonded together in the same manner and can come closer to achieving their aggregate bandwidth than routing schemes which simply load-balance outgoing network connections over the links.

Similarly, multiple DSL lines can be bonded to give higher bandwidth; in the United Kingdom, ADSL is sometimes bonded to give for example 512kbit/s upload bandwidth and 4megabit/s download bandwidth, in areas that only have access to 2megabit/s bandwidth.

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