MPWiFi: Synergizing MPTCP Based Simultaneous Multipath Access and WiFi Network Performance

Abstract

Multipath TCP (MPTCP) enables a client to exploit multiple wireless paths simultaneously for improved throughput and mobility resilience. However, MPTCP clients in WiFi networks may easily lower the achievable throughput of the network due to excessively created connections over access points (APs), particularly those that own a weak link quality. This is caused by the fact that the maximal achievable throughput of a WiFi AP can be easily affected by the number of connections accessing it and the link qualities of those connections. In this paper, we first verify such effects through extensive experiments and analysis. We then propose a novel scheme, denoted MPWiFi, to solve this issue while keeping the benefits of MPTCP based multipath access in WiFi networks. Our scheme allows a MPTCP client to obtain resources on its best WiFi path freely and suppresses its subflows in additional paths when congestion happens. As a result, the degrading to the WiFi AP's achievable throughput is greatly prevented with acceptable influences on the benefits of MPTCP clients (i.e., their multipath access is intervened only on congested non-best APs). The fairness to MPTCP clients is also guaranteed through their best WiFi connection. The proposed solution is implemented along with the Linux Kernel MPTCP implementation. Extensive real-world deployment based experiments and NS3 simulation show that the proposed scheme can effectively alleviate the adverse impact of MPTCP based multipath access in WiFi networks while keeping its benefits.