Jitter-aware packet scheduler for concurrent multipath transmission in heterogeneous wireless networks

Abstract

Mobile devices equipped with multiple network interfaces have the potential to increase transmission throughput by exploiting concurrent multipath transmission (CMT). However, packet scheduling for CMT is challenging since the diversity of latencies among transmission paths can easily yield out-of-order packet receptions and cause receiver buffer blocking if the receiver buffer is not large enough. Previous studies proposed several solutions attempting to eliminate out-of-order receptions and receiver buffer blocking. Delay-Aware Packet scheduling (DAPS) is the only one among them that considers delay diversity at the sender side when scheduling packets. However, DAPS assumes quasi-static path delay and thus does not perform well if path delay changes dynamically. In this paper, we analyze how jitter affects the performance of DAPS. Furthermore, we propose and implement a jitter-aware packet scheduler named JAPS. Performance evaluations show that JAPS outperforms existing algorithms in terms of throughput under different settings of data volume, receiver buffer size, network jitter and bandwidth ratio.