An Approach to Reinforce Multipath TCP with Path-Aware Information.

Kien Nguyen,Fumihide Kojima,Kentaro Ishizu,Hiroo Sekiya,Mirza Golam Kibria

doi:10.3390/s19030476

Abstract

Multipath TCP (MPTCP), which enables the use of multiple wireless links (e.g., Wi-Fi and LTE) for data transmissions, is an excellent technology for evolving multi-homing devices in mobile wireless networks. This paper explores concepts and feasibility of realizing MPTCP with path awareness (PA), in which the path-aware information is leveraged to reinforce the MPTCP transmissions. In particular, when aware of a network situation, a device can facilitate a mechanism that dynamically shifts the MPTCP traffic to a single path and vice versa. As a result, MPTCP with PA could solve the significant problem of negative aggregation benefit when the MPTCP throughput over divergent paths is worse than the best one of single-path TCP. We illustrate the feasibility of the proposed concept through our new implementation of a so-called MPTCP-LA (i.e., MPTCP with Loss Awareness). MPTCP-LA keeps the aggregation benefits non-negative by temporarily switching an MPTCP transmission on a path to a standby condition when the on-device observed loss reaches a threshold. We extensively evaluate MPTCP-LA in comparison to the standard MPTCP in an emulated environment. The results show that MPTCP-LA has better performance regarding enhancing throughput and saving networking resources.

Highlights

Mobile devices and Internet access have become very important for human lives in recent years.the popularity of Wi-Fi and the ubiquitous deployments of cellular networks have changed the behavior of Internet users
As a proof of concept, we propose Multipath TCP (MPTCP) with loss awareness (i.e., MPTCP-LA), which aims to bypass the problem of negative aggregation benefit in a lossy wireless environment
An MPTCP-capable device can communicate with an application server via the two paths associated with the wireless links

Summary

Introduction

Mobile devices and Internet access have become very important for human lives in recent years. The popularity of Wi-Fi and the ubiquitous deployments of cellular networks have changed the behavior of Internet users. Instead of using wired connections, the Internet users prefer to access the Internet via wireless links (e.g., either Wi-Fi or LTE on their mobile devices). Along with the evolution to the fifth generation of the mobile wireless network (i.e., 5G), Multipath TCP (MPTCP) is one of the most successful technologies for realizing the concurrency. Wi-Fi has been on many electric devices for a wide range of applications. On mobile devices such as phones or tablets, the default. The achievable throughput of Wi-Fi link is significantly increased (from 11 Mbps in IEEE 11b to up to 300 Mbps in IEEE 802.11n or multi-Gbps in IEEE 802.11ad)

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