Device‐centric data reordering and buffer management for mobile Internet using Multipath Transmission Control Protocol

Abstract

SummaryToday's smart mobile devices (SMDs) are equipped with multiple interfaces, powerful processors, and workable battery power. Such SMDs are making future networks truly heterogeneous. In such future mobile networks, there is an opportunity to utilize the SMD's interfaces concurrently. There are challenges in the implementation of this idea, because regular TCP does not support path aggregation, multihoming, and full‐mesh networking. The multipath TCP (MPTCP) is a power set of TCP extensions that provide the subflows on each SMD's interface. The MPTCP runs over the existing infrastructure of the TCP by using TCP options field, without compromising the normal TCP functions. An end‐to‐end data scheduling and data reordering are important issues in such mobile Internet across multiple subflows of MPTCP. In this paper, we proposed the mechanisms for multipath scheduling, device‐centric data reordering, and buffer management to achieve concurrent utilization of SMD's LTE and Wi‐Fi interfaces for video stream applications on mobile Internet. We modeled the approaches for multipath scheduling and reordering to ensure the improved utilization of SMD's interfaces and decrease the buffer usage. The proposed approaches consider the outstanding data bytes and latency of each MPTCP subflow. The proposed approaches are tested on a MPTCP‐supported testbed, and captured data are analyzed in terms of gross throughput, buffer usage, end‐to‐end performance, and path utilization of subflows on SMD's LTE and Wi‐Fi interfaces. The performance is evaluated and compared with related state‐of‐the‐art approaches, and significant improvement is observed.