MARS: Multiple Access Radio Scheduling for a Multi-homed Mobile Device in Soft-RAN

Abstract

In order to improve the Quality-of-Service (QoS) of latency sensitive applications in next-generation cellular networks, multi-path is adopted to transmit packet stream in real-time to achieve high-quality video transmission in heterogeneous wireless networks. However, multi-path also introduces two important challenges: out-of-order issue and reordering delay. In this paper, we propose a new architecture based on Software Defined Network (SDN) for flow aggregation and flow splitting, and then design a Multiple Access Radio Scheduling (MARS) scheme based on relative Round-Trip Time (RTT) measurement. The QoS metrics including end-to-end delay, throughput and the packet out-of-order problem at the receiver have been investigated using the extensive simulation experiments. The performance results show that this SDN architecture coupled with the proposed MARS scheme can reduce the end-to-end delay and the reordering delay time caused by packet out-of-order as well as achieve a better throughput than the existing SMOS and Round-Robin algorithms.