Mobile devices equipped with multiple network interfaces can increase their throughput by making use of parallel transmissions over multiple paths and bandwidth aggregation, enabled by the stream control transport protocol (SCTP). However, the different bandwidth and delay of the multiple paths will determine data to be received out of order and in the absence of related mechanisms to correct this, serious application-level performance degradations will occur. This paper proposes a novel quality-aware adaptive concurrent multipath transfer solution (CMT-QA) that utilizes SCTP for FTP-like data transmission and real-time video delivery in wireless heterogeneous networks. CMT-QA monitors and analyses regularly each path's data handling capability and makes data delivery adaptation decisions to select the qualified paths for concurrent data transfer. CMT-QA includes a series of mechanisms to distribute data chunks over multiple paths intelligently and control the data traffic rate of each path independently. CMT-QA's goal is to mitigate the out-of-order data reception by reducing the reordering delay and unnecessary fast retransmissions. CMT-QA can effectively differentiate between different types of packet loss to avoid unreasonable congestion window adjustments for retransmissions. Simulations show how CMT-QA outperforms existing solutions in terms of performance and quality of service.Index Terms-Quality awareness, concurrent multipath transfer, SCTP, heterogeneous wireless network, video delivery Ç 1 INTRODUCTION I N recent years, wireless communication technologies have experienced an extremely rapid development. Supported by the latest technological advances, mobile devices have also become smarter and many are already equipped with multiple network interfaces [1]. Large number of increasingly complex services and applications in various areas of interest, including business and entertainment, are widely offered to users of these mobile devices over the wireless networks, making use of their ubiquitous access support [2], [3], [4]. However, the heterogeneity of the wireless network environment requires additional solutions to enable smooth high-quality service provisioning. The stream control transmission protocol (SCTP) [5], [6], [7], with its multihoming feature [8] and SCTP's dynamic reconfiguration extension (mSCTP) [9] are very promising protocols to support efficient data transmission, including seamless handover in heterogeneous wireless networks.Concurrent multipath transfer (CMT) uses SCTP's multihoming feature to concurrently distribute data across multiple independent end-to-end paths in a multihomed SCTP association [10], [11]. Mobile devices equipped with multiple network interfaces can achieve bandwidth aggregation by using CMT to improve data throughput, bandwidth resource utilization, and system robustness [12]. Fig. 1 illustrates CMT usage in a heterogeneous wireless environment. It shows how a smart phone can concurrently use both 3G/4G and WiFi access links to communicate with the server. It...
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