Reduce delay of multipath TCP in IoT networks

Mohammed Aljubayri,Tong Peng,Mohammad Shikh-Bahaei

doi:10.1007/s11276-021-02701-3

Abstract

Multi-homed devices such as smartphones, tablets and laptops are enabled with multiple heterogeneous interfaces available for transmission. Those interfaces can be utilized for simultaneous transmission of a single TCP flow using Multipath TCP (MPTCP). MPTCP is a protocol that is designed to increase end-to-end throughput and reliability of communications by splitting data through multiple parallel paths. Although delay in MPTCP enhanced significantly in the recent years, high number of data transmissions remains an issue. In this paper, we reduce MPTCP delay by reducing the number of transmissions using Opportunistic Routing (OR) technique. OR is a routing model used to increase the delivery rate and reliability of data transmission in wireless networks by using the broadcasting method. This enables each subflow data to be delivered by multiple relays. We adapted OR on a number of MPTCP protocols namely, traditional MPTCP, Multipath TCP Traffic Splitting Control (MPTCP-TSC) and Redundant MPTCP (ReMP TCP) in an Internet of Things (IoT) environment. The results show that OR-based MPTCP schemes outperform existing schemes. We further compared the OR-based MPTCP protocols in terms of startup delay and energy efficiency. We found that ReMP TCP is better than other schemes in all scenarios.

Highlights

Next-generation networks such as the Internet of Things (IoT), smart healthcare, and intelligent transportation systems generate a massive amount of traffic with stringent Quality of Service (QoS) requirements such as high throughput, low delay and packet-loss [1]
The existing Multipath Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) (MPTCP) protocols perform well for traditional routing-based networks. Such a routing method is shown to have high number of transmissions, compared to Opportunistic Routing, which result in delay
The simulation results show that the Opportunistic Routing (OR)-MPTCP schemes reduced the number of transmissions compared to the existing schemes without using the OR method

Summary

Introduction

Next-generation networks such as the Internet of Things (IoT), smart healthcare, and intelligent transportation systems generate a massive amount of traffic with stringent Quality of Service (QoS) requirements such as high throughput, low delay and packet-loss [1]. Regular Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) is originally designed for wired networks and adapted in wireless networks which gives rise to some issues such as high packet loss and delay [2]. We introduce OR to the protocols [11,12,13] to reduce the number of transmissions required to successfully deliver a packet to the destination. This will lead to delay reduction and efficient use of network resources in the IoT scenario.

Related work

Schemes without OR

Schemes with OR

Findings

Conclusion and future work