No abstract

No abstract

Summary Today's smart mobile devices (SMDs) are equipped with multiple interfaces, powerful processors, and workable battery power. Such SMDs are making future networks truly heterogeneous. In such future mobile networks, there is an opportunity to utilize the SMD's interfaces concurrently. There are challenges in the implementation of this idea, because regular TCP does not support path aggregation, multihoming, and full‐mesh networking. The multipath TCP (MPTCP) is a power set of TCP extensions that provide the subflows on each SMD's interface. The MPTCP runs over the existing infrastructure of the TCP by using TCP options field, without compromising the normal TCP functions. An end‐to‐end data scheduling and data reordering are important issues in such mobile Internet across multiple subflows of MPTCP. In this paper, we proposed the mechanisms for multipath scheduling, device‐centric data reordering, and buffer management to achieve concurrent utilization of SMD's LTE and Wi‐Fi interfaces for video stream applications on mobile Internet. We modeled the approaches for multipath scheduling and reordering to ensure the improved utilization of SMD's interfaces and decrease the buffer usage. The proposed approaches consider the outstanding data bytes and latency of each MPTCP subflow. The proposed approaches are tested on a MPTCP‐supported testbed, and captured data are analyzed in terms of gross throughput, buffer usage, end‐to‐end performance, and path utilization of subflows on SMD's LTE and Wi‐Fi interfaces. The performance is evaluated and compared with related state‐of‐the‐art approaches, and significant improvement is observed.

The bandwidth-intensive applications on Smart-Mobile-Devices (SMDs) are increasing with SMD's colossal growth. The overlapped cellular and non-cellular networks, in hot-spot-places, and SMDs capabilities are significant reasons for this growth. SMD's interfaces-RAT (Radio-Access-Technology) can have complementary link characteristics. The end-users can avail always-best-connectivity (ABC) on their SMDs with complementary RAT characteristics. This paper proposes an Integrated-multi-RAT-utilization (Im-Ru) framework for multipathcomputing support to realize ABC for the end-users. The Im-Ru framework has two approaches. The First is a hybrid-RATdiscovery model based on SMD's interfaces, current-location, and identification using ANDSF and MIIS servers. The second is the user's preference-based RAT-selection using weighted-RATparameters. We observe that the Im-Ru framework for multipathcomputing is useful in future 5G-NR networks. We analyzed the Im-Ru's performance related to average-throughput improvement over the existing approaches for SMD's different speeds and observed a significant improvement. The experimental results show that Im-Ru is more reliable by realizing lower packet-loss and delay than existing work.