Novel Multipath TCP Scheduling Design for Future IoT Applications

Abstract

<div>Today, mobile devices like smartphones are supported with various wireless radio interfaces including cellular (3G/4G/LTE) and Wi-Fi (IEEE 802.11) [46]. The legacy devices can only communicate with only one interface. The Transmission Control Protocol, or TCP, has a limitation inability to change connection settings without breaking the connection. Multi-path TCP (MPTCP) protocol has been proposed to solve TCP single-interface limitation and provides a huge improvement on application performance by using multiple paths transparently (auto path changing). The last mile is the final networking segment which carried all network traffic. The available bandwidth in last-mile link can effectively harm the network throughput as it limits the amount of transmitted data. The quality of the last mile networks significantly determines the reliability and quality of the carrying network. MPTCP can provide a convenient solution for the last mile problem. An MPTCP scheduler needs to provide significant packet routing schedules based on the current status of paths (sub-flows) in terms of loss rate, bandwidth and jitter, in a way, maximizing the network goodput. MPTCP extends the TCP by enabling a single byte stream split into multiple byte streams and transfer them over multiple disjoint network paths or subflows. An MPTCP connection combines a set of different subflows where each subflow performance depends on the condition of its path (including packet loss rate, queue delay, and throughput capacity). Unreliable packet scheduling may lead to critical networking issues such as the head-of-line (HoL) blocking where the packets scheduled on the low-latency path must wait for the packets on the high-latency path to ensure in-order delivery and the out-of-order (OFO) packets, the receiver must maintain a large queue to reorganize the received packets. In this project, we aim to study and experiment MPTCP scheduling on dynamic networks (like a cellular network) and try to propose an MPTCP schema which can be effective to overcome limitations of dynamic networks performance.</div>