Multipath strategies and solutions in multihomed mobile environments

Abstract

Cognitive infocommunications research has been on the rise in recent years and it is becoming more and more prevalent. The underlying network infrastructure needs to be able to satisfy the new requirements set forth by these systems that also include 3D video and audio delivery. Now more than ever, it is also inevitable to take mobile devices into consideration when talking about the development and use cases of new technologies. These also need to be prepared to provide an experience as seamless as possible. This means utilizing the available network resources with a high efficiency both in mobile and desktop environments. In our paper we briefly summarize the solutions available today for using multiple network interfaces simultaneously, providing throughput aggregation and failover capabilities. We discuss a couple of already implemented multi-interface mobile environments, their operating principles, their advantages and drawbacks. We review the difficulties of operating multiple interfaces in a mobile environment, and the solutions provided in different implementations. We present our own results in the topic, achieved with the MPT Library developed at the University of Debrecen, Faculty of Informatics. We also touch on the software's Android implementation, describe the differences to other implementations and examine possibilities for further development.