Concurrent Multipath Transfer Research Articles

Modeling the Throughput of CMT-SCTP

Based on the multi-streaming and multi-homing features of SCTP, the researchers proposed Concurrent Multipath Transfer (CMT). In order to aggregate bandwidth and improve the transmission throughput of end-to-end network, many new paradigms, such as Information Centric Network (ICN), are created. These new network architectures contain massive redundant paths, which provide more opportunities for CMT enhancement. However, most previous analytic models of throughput only focus on single path. Although some scenarios take into account multiple paths, the performance parameters of the paths are supposed to be the same, which is hard to achieve in practical circumstance. In this paper, we develop a simple analytic mechanism for CMT-SCTP throughput. Sending rate is selected as a function of loss rate, bandwidth and Round-Trip Time (RTT). Different with previous models, our mechanism considers different performance parameters for multiple paths. The simulation results show that our model is able to predict CMT-SCTP sending rate accurately under various network conditions.

Improving Multipath Video Transmission With Raptor Codes in Heterogeneous Wireless Networks

Supported by the latest technical innovations mobile users are able to simultaneously receive real-time streaming services with different radio access technologies (e.g. LTE and Wi-Fi). The stream control transmission protocol (SCTP) is a vitally important transport protocol to enable concurrent multipath transfer (CMT) in heterogeneous wireless networks with multihomed terminals. However enabling CMT of real-time video streaming to multihomed mobiles is challenged with key technical dilemmas: 1) high-quality real-time video transmission is constrained by stringent requirements in delay and throughput; 2) wireless networks are bandwidth-limited and error-prone; and 3) the congestion control and packet retransmission modules in the SCTP may incur frequent deadline violations and throughput fluctuations. Motivated by addressing these challenging problems this research proposes a Video and Raptor code aware CMT (CMT-VR) solution. First we develop a mathematical model to formulate the utility maximization problem of multipath real-time video delivery over parallel wireless networks. Second we present a transmission framework that includes online packet scheduling Raptor coding adaptation and retransmission control algorithms. CMT-VR is distinct from the existing SCTPs in leveraging the video frame priority and rateless Raptor coding. The performance verification is conducted by means of system evaluations over real wireless networks and extensive semiphysical emulations in the Exata platform. Evaluation results demonstrate that CMT-VR achieves appreciable improvements over the reference schemes in perceived video quality goodput and end-to-end delay.

Network Coding as a Performance Booster for Concurrent Multi-Path Transfer of Data in Multi-Hop Wireless Networks

The emerging use of multi-homed wireless devices along with simultaneous multi-path data transfer offers tremendous potentials to improve the capacity of multi-hop wireless networks. The use of simultaneous data transfer over separate disjoint paths in multi-hop wireless networks to increase network capacity is a less explored subject, mainly because of the challenges it triggers for the reliable transport layer protocols. Reliable transport layer protocols generally use packet sequence number as a mean to ensure delivery. As such, the out-of-order packet arrival in reliable transport layer protocols triggers receiver buffer blocking that causes throughput degradation and prevents the reliable multi-path transport layer protocol to realize its vast potential. This paper focuses on integrating network coding with a reliable multi-path transport layer protocol to resolve the receiver buffer blocking problem. We propose an adaptive network coding mechanism to desensitize the receiver against packet reordering and consequently eliminate the receiver buffer blocking problem. Our state-of-the-art network coding scheme uses a combination of Q-learning and logistic regression for rare data events to control the number of redundant packets based on the network dynamics. We confirmed the veracity of our proposed scheme by a queuing theory based mathematical model. Moreover, the effectiveness of the proposed scheme is demonstrated through simulations and testbed experiments.

An adaptive data chunk scheduling for concurrent multipath transfer

Concurrent Multipath Transfer (CMT) is a transport layer protocol which provides concurrent data transfer over the multiple paths. CMT improves the available bandwidth utilization, fault tolerance, robustness and reliability of the network. However, in multipath data transfer, destination receives out-of-order data chunk due to dissimilar delay and bandwidth of each path. It causes the serious problem of receiver buffer blocking, unwanted congestion window (cwnd) reduction and unnecessary retransmission, which significantly degrades the performance of CMT. Thus, this paper proposes an adaptive data chunk scheduling for CMT (A-CMT). The proposed method uses path delay and bandwidth as a factor of data chunk scheduling to adapt path conditions. The simulation results show that proposed method achieves better performance in terms of throughput; file transfer time and congestion window growth. The proposed method improves average throughput up to 13%.

An adaptive traffic distribution scheme for CMT based on Lotka-Volterra model in multihomed networks

CMT (concurrent multipath transfer) can increase throughput and transmission efficiency in multihomed networks. However, it is still an important challenge about distributing traffic adaptively into multiple access networks. Based on LV (Lotka-Volterra) model, we propose an adaptive traffic distribution scheme. In the scheme, two competition modes are concluded, multiple S-D (source-destination) streams competition for bandwidth of one path and multipath competition for traffic between each multihomed S-D host pair. Actually, each access network can establish a path for S-D pairs. So, in the first mode, each path is analogous to a predator, and overall traffic in a multihomed host is reducing file transmission time and increasing network throughput in FTP service analogous to prey. Then, each path has to compete for the traffic by path information, e.g., bandwidth and congestion level. In the other one, if several S-D pairs pass through a shared path simultaneously, they will compete for bandwidth of the path. Here, each S-D pair is analogous to a predator, and the bandwidth of the common path is analogous to the prey. At last, compared with other three schemes, uniform traffic distribution, greedy path selection, random path selection in OPNET simulator, the proposed scheme can perform better on

Deterministic Time Markov Chain Modelling of Simultaneous Multipath Transmission Schemes

The increase in the availability of multimode devices for ubiquitous network access and the need for larger bandwidth have created a thrust for the utilization of simultaneous network connections. Unfortunately, the standard transport layer protocols such as the transmission control protocol and user datagram protocol have structural constraints. As a result, an Internet application can use only one interface at a time. The stream control transmission protocol (SCTP) provides support for concurrent multipath transfer (SCTP-CMT). In this paper, we present the mathematical modeling of simultaneous multipath transmission (SMT) schemes using the deterministic time Markov chain (DTMC) model. In this DTMC model, receiver buffer size is used for the first time to estimate the sending data rate. The DTMC model of SMT schemes are compared with the SCTP-CMT using probability-based packet dropped scenarios. DTMC modeling is used to mathematically verify simulation results of SMT Schemes i.e., modified fast retransmit (SMT-MFR) and adaptive modified fast retransmit (SMT-AMFR). The analytical model results revealed that SMT-MFR outperformed SCTP-CMT by 8.54% gain in average throughput. SMT-AMFR outperformed the SCTP-CMT and SMT-MFR by 19.65% and 11.15% gain in average throughput, respectively.

A smart fairness mechanism for Concurrent multipath transfer in SCTP over wireless multi-hop networks

The emerging use of multihomed devices in wireless multi-hop networks has increased the demand for multipath transport protocols, such as Concurrent multipath transfer in Stream control transmission protocol (CMT-SCTP). The fairness of CMT-SCTP over wireless multi-hop settings is a critical issue since it can harm the performance of the existing legacy protocols such as Transmission control protocol (TCP) and single-homed SCTP. As such, in this paper, we study the fairness behavior of CMT-SCTP on a multi-hop wireless testbed. The investigation reveals that CMT-SCTP is significantly unfair towards flows coming from farther away hops. Consequently, we introduce a distributed Q-learning mechanism to enhance the fairness of CMT-SCTP association towards other flows. The proposed method uses Reinforcement learning (RL) to acquire knowledge about network dynamics. The acquired knowledge is used to choose the best action to improve the fairness index of the network. We compare our proposal with standard CMT-SCTP and Resource pool CMT-SCTP (CMT/RP-SCTP). Extensive experimentation confirms that our proposal significantly outperforms the available fairness mechanisms for CMT-SCTP.

Is multi-path transport suitable for latency sensitive traffic?

This paper assesses whether multi-path communication can help latency-sensitive applications to satisfy the requirements of their users. We consider Concurrent Multi-path Transfer for SCTP (CMT-SCTP) and Multi-path TCP (MPTCP) and evaluate their proficiency in transporting video, gaming, and web traffic over combinations of WLAN and 3G interfaces. To ensure the validity of our evaluation, several experimental approaches were used including simulation, emulation and live experiments. When paths are symmetric in terms of capacity, delay and loss rate, we find that the experienced latency is significantly reduced, compared to using a single path. Using multiple asymmetric paths does not affect latency – applications do not experience any increase or decrease, but might benefit from other advantages of multi-path communication. In the light of our conclusions, multi-path transport is suitable for latency-sensitive traffic and mature enough to be widely deployed.

Research on the Extension of SCTP Protocol on the Heterogeneous Wireless Network

As a promising candidate of general-purpose transport layer protocol, the Stream Control Transmission Protocol (SCTP) has its new features such as multi-homing and multi-streaming. SCTP association can make concurrent multi-path transfer an appealing candidate to satisfy the ever increasing user demands for bandwidth by using Multi-homing feature. And multiple streams provide an aggregation mechanism to accommodate heterogeneous objects, which belong to the same application but may require different QoS from the network. In this paper, the authors introduce WM2-SCTP (Wireless Multi-path Multi-flow - Stream Control Transmission Protocol), a transport layer solution for concurrent multi-path transfer with parallel sub-flows. WM2-SCTP aims at exploiting SCTP's multi-homing and multi-streaming capability by grouping SCTP streams into sub-flows based on their required QoS and selecting best paths for each sub-flow to improve data transfer rates. The results show that under different scenarios WM2-SCTP is able to support QoS among the SCTP stream, and it achieves a better throughput.

CMT-NC: Improving the Concurrent Multipath Transfer Performance Using Network Coding in Wireless Networks

The growing popularity of multihoming mobile terminals has encouraged the use of concurrent multipath transfer (CMT) to provide network diversity and accelerated content distribution in ubiquitous and heterogeneous wireless network environments. However, CMT severely degrades its performance, which is mostly due to both data reordering required as a result of great path dissimilarity and frequent packet loss due to wireless channel unreliability. Most delivery approaches follow the packet sequence numbers and thereby result in strict in-order and packet-specific reception. Passively adapting to the network variations, those approaches are not general enough to address CMT problems. This paper proposes to apply network coding (NC) principles to CMT, to break the strong binding between data packets and their sequence numbers, and then improve its performance. The proposed CMT-NC solution avoids data reordering to mitigate buffer blocking and compensates for the lost packets to reduce the number of retransmissions. Its specific encoding approach reduces the encoding complexity and fully ensures decoding feasibility. Furthermore, the group-based transmission management enhances the robustness and reliability of the data transfer. Simulation results show how CMT-NC is a highly efficient data transport solution outperforming existing state-of-the-art solutions.

Content-Aware Concurrent Multipath Transfer for High-Definition Video Streaming over Heterogeneous Wireless Networks

Delivering high-definition (HD) wireless video under stringent delay constraint is challenging with regard to the limited network resources and high transmission rate. Concurrent multipath transfer (CMT) using stream control transmission protocol (SCTP) exploits the multihoming feature of mobile devices to establish associations with different access networks. In this paper, we study the multihomed HD video communication with SCTP over heterogeneous wireless networks. The existing CMT schemes mainly treat the traffic data in a content-agnostic fashion, and thus cannot effectively leverage the scarce wireless resources to maximize the perceived video quality. To address this critical issue, we propose a content-aware CMT (CMT-CA) solution that featured by the unequal frame-level scheduling based on estimated video parameters and feedback channel status. First, we develop an analytical framework to model the total distortion of parallel video transmission over multiple wireless access networks. Second, we introduce a joint congestion control and data distribution scheme to minimize the total distortion based on online quality evaluation and Markov decision process (MDP). The performance of CMT-CA is evaluated through extensive semi-physical emulations in Exata involving HD video encoded with H.264 codec. Experimental results show that CMT-CA outperforms the reference schemes in terms of video peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR), end-to-end delay, and goodput. Or conversely, CMT-CA achieves the same video quality with $20$ percent bandwidth conservation.

DIMR: Disjoint Interdomain Multipath Routing

Interdomain Multipath Routing, which allows an AS to transport packets to the same destination via different paths, is a promising technique for achieving high bandwidth, high resiliency and fast reaction to failures. However, previous Interdomain Multipath Routing algorithms often produce overlapped paths, thus are vulnerable to the failure of bottlenecks, and are also inefficient to support interdomain traffic engineering or concurrent multipath transfer. In this paper, we propose Disjoint Interdomain Multipath Routing (DIMR), which helps more ASes to discover two disjoint paths for each destination AS. The core idea of DIMR is a novel concept named path pair, which combines two disjoint or partly disjoint paths. We design the rules of path pair selection and build a theoretical model to formally prove the convergence of a network running DIMR. To fully utilize the disjoint paths, we also propose two packet forwarding approaches, both of which are guaranteed to be loop-free. Our simulation results show thatDIMR enables about 90% of multi-connected ASes to install two disjoint paths.

Receiver-driven Cooperation-based Concurrent Multipath Transfer over Heterogeneous Wireless Networks

The advantages of employing SCTP-based Concurrent Multipath Transfer (CMT) have been demonstrated to be very useful for data delivery over multi-homed wireless networks. However, there is still significant ongoing work addressing some remaining limitations and challenges. The most important concern when applying CMT to data delivery is related to handling packet reordering and buffer blocking. Another concern on this topic is that current sender-based CMT solutions seldom consider balancing the overhead and sharing the load between the sender and receiver. This paper proposes a novel Receiver-driven Cooperation-based Concurrent Multipath Transfer solution (CMT-Rev) with the following aims: (i) to balance overhead and share load between the sender and receiver, by moving some functions including congestion and flow control from the sender onto receiver; (ii) to mitigate the data reordering and buffer blocking problems, by using an adaptive receiver-cooperative path aggregation model, (iii) to adaptively transmit packets over multiple paths according to their receiver-inspired sending rate values, by employing a new receiver-aware data distribution scheduler. Simulation results show that CMT-Rev outperforms the existing CMT solutions in terms of data delivery performance.

Cross-Layer Fairness-Driven Concurrent Multipath Video Delivery Over Heterogeneous Wireless Networks

The growing availability of various wireless access technologies promotes increasing demand for mobile video applications. Stream control transmission protocol (SCTP)-based concurrent multipath transfer (CMT) improves the wireless video delivery performance with its parallel transmission and bandwidth (BW) aggregation features. However, the existing CMT solutions deployed at the transport layer only are not accurate enough due to lower layer uncertainties, such as variations of the wireless channel. In addition, CMT-based video transmission may use excessive BW in comparison with the popular Transmission Control Protocol (TCP)-based flows, which results in unfair sharing of network resources. This paper proposes a novel cross-layer fairness-driven (CL/FD) SCTP-based CMT solution (CMT-CL/FD) to improve video delivery performance, while remaining fair to the competing TCP flows. CMT-CL/FD utilizes a cross-layer approach to monitor and analyze path quality, which includes wireless channel measurements at the data-link layer and rate/BW estimations at the transport layer. Furthermore, an innovative window-based mechanism is applied for flow control to balance delivery fairness and efficiency. Finally, CMT-CL/FD intelligently distributes video data over different paths depending on their estimated quality to mitigate packet reordering and loss, under the constraint of TCP-friendly flow control. Simulation results show how CMT-CL/FD outperforms existing solutions in terms of both video delivery performance and TCP-friendliness.

A multipath variant of SCTP with optimized flow division extension

In the literature, Multipath Stream Control Transmission Protocol (MPSCTP) has been proposed as a multipath variant of Stream Control Transmission Protocol (SCTP). Unlike SCTP, MPSCTP uses the multiple available paths between the source and the destination in concurrent fashion using the multihoming feature of SCTP. MPSCTP in its original form implicitly assumes no acknowledgment loss. In this work, a modified algorithm for MPSCTP is proposed to mitigate this limitation and its performance is compared with Concurrent Multipath Transfer (CMT) using ns2 based simulation. A new path selection strategy for data transmission is incorporated and its results are compared with the RTX-CWND strategy proposed in the literature. This paper also presents a heuristic to implement delay insensitive optimization. The performance of this optimization for MPSCTP has been studied using ns2 based simulations. We have also presented the performance results of MPSCTP implementation in the Linux Kernel.

Analysis of SCTP Concurrent Multipath Transfer in Vehicular Network Communication

Many studies have used SCTP to evaluate the transmission service in network, but there are still some inadequacies of SCTP in vehicular network. This paper introduce some new mechanisms based on SCTP, including parallel multi-path transmission mechanism (SCTPCMT), part of reliable mechanism (PR-SCTP) and mobile extension mechanism (M-SCTP). The study discusses the basic properties of SCTP and compare SCTP-CMT with SCTP and TCP. As there are some inadequacies of SCTP in the vehicular network environment, in order to improve the transmission performance of SCTP concurrent multipath transfer mechanism, we propose a new binomial congestion control algorithm to solve the congestion and receiver buffer problem of SCTP which was caused by wireless signal errors, the improvement includes the improved congestion control algorithm and retransmission timeout algorithm. Finally, we establish simulation topology and modify the code by using NS2 simulation platform. The simulation results indicate that the improved protocol can effectively distinguish wireless signal errors and network congestion and significantly promote the throughput in vehicle network, which make SCTP-CMT more effective to apply in wireless vehicle network environment.

Distortion-Aware Concurrent Multipath Transfer for Mobile Video Streaming in Heterogeneous Wireless Networks

The massive proliferation of wireless infrastructures with complementary characteristics prompts the bandwidth aggregation for Concurrent Multipath Transfer (CMT) over heterogeneous access networks. Stream Control Transmission Protocol (SCTP) is the standard transport-layer solution to enable CMT in multihomed communication environments. However, delivering high-quality streaming video with the existing CMT solutions still remains problematic due to the stringent QoS (Quality of Service) requirements and path asymmetry in heterogeneous wireless networks. In this paper, we advance the state of the art by introducing video distortion into the decision process of multipath data transfer. The proposed Distortion-Aware Concurrent Multipath Transfer (CMT-DA) solution includes three phases: 1) per-path status estimation and congestion control; 2) quality-optimal video flow rate allocation; 3) delay and loss controlled data retransmission. The term `flow rate allocation' indicates dynamically picking appropriate access networks and assigning the transmission rates. We analytically formulate the data distribution over multiple communication paths to minimize the end-to-end video distortion and derive the solution based on the utility maximization theory. The performance of the proposed CMT-DA is evaluated through extensive semi-physical emulations in Exata involving H.264 video streaming. Experimental results show that CMT-DA outperforms the reference schemes in terms of video PSNR (Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio), goodput, and inter-packet delay.

CMT-CC: Cross-Layer Cognitive CMT for Efficient Multimedia Distribution over Multi-homed Wireless Networks

This paper proposes CMT-CC, a novel cross-layer cognitive concurrent multipath transfer (CMT) solution necessitating the following aims: (i) cross-layer design, (ii) fairness to TCP-like flows, and (iii) improve users' quality of experience for multimedia streaming service. To satisfy above requirements, a newly cross-layer network condition sensor is designed in CMT-CC in order to cognize network condition and distinguishes the causes of network condition change. An intelligent multimedia content distributor is further introduced in CMT-CC for enabling adaptive multimedia distribution behavior appropriate for the varying wireless network condition. To make CMT-CC preserve fairness to TCP flows on congested links, a weighted moving congestion window based TCP-friendly congestion control mechanism is developed in CMT-CC. The results gained by a close realistic simulation topology show how the proposed CMT-CC solution significantly improves throughput, as well as multimedia delivery performance while still remaining fair to TCP-like flows.

Temporary redundant transmission mechanism for SCTP multihomed hosts.

In SCTP's Concurrent Multipath Transfer, if data is sent to the destined IP(s) without knowledge of the paths condition, packets may be lost or delayed. This is because of the bursty nature of IP traffic and physical damage to the network. To offset these problems, network path status is examined using our new mechanism Multipath State Aware Concurrent Multipath Transfer using redundant transmission (MSACMT-RTv2). Here the status of multiple paths is analyzed, initially and periodically thereafter transmitted. After examination, paths priority is assigned before transmission. One path is temporarily employed as redundant path for the failure-expected path (FEP); this redundant path is used for transmitting redundant data. At the end of predefined period, reliability of the FEP is confirmed. If FEP is ensured to be reliable, temporary path is transformed into normal CMT path. MSACMT-RTv2 algorithm is simulated using the Delaware University ns-2 SCTP/CMT module (ns-2; V2.29). We present and discuss MSACMT-RTv2 performance in asymmetric path delay and with finite receiver buffer (rbuf) size. We extended our experiment to test robustness of this algorithm and inferred exhaustive result. It is inferred that our algorithm outperforms better in terms of increasing the throughput and reducing the latency than existing system.

CMT‐CQA: Cross‐layer QoS‐aware adaptive concurrent multipath data transfer in heterogeneous networks

Stream control transport protocol (SCTP)‐based concurrent multipath transfer (CMT) can help multi‐homed devices to increase their throughput by making use of parallel transmissions over multiple paths and bandwidth aggregation. However, if CMT cannot identify wireless error, it cannot really achieve the desired performance. Furthermore, if CMT only utilizes all available paths for data delivery, it will undoubtedly degrade application‐level performance since the asymmetric paths may involve large quality differences. This paper proposes a novel cross‐layer quality‐of‐service (QoS)‐aware adaptive CMT (CMT‐CQA) with the following aims: (i) to provide an adaptive ‘CMT‐to‐partial CMT’ adjustment strategy for efficient bandwidth aggregation by jointly considering transport layer QoS, MAC layer QoS, and path history information; (ii) to address an enhanced congestion window (cwnd) fast recovery mechanism to reduce bursty transmission in multi‐homed wireless network environments where fail‐over occurs frequently; and (iii) to introduce a proper multimedia transmission behavior to improve users' quality of experience (QoE) for multimedia streaming service. Simulation results show that CMT‐CQA outperforms the existing CMT solutions in terms of performance and QoS. © 2014 Institute of Electrical Engineers of Japan. Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.