Poster: Use your Senses: A Smooth Multipath TCP WiFi/Mobile Handover

Abstract

The handover from WiFi to mobile networks is known to lead to TCP connection drops due to changing IP addresses. Multipath TCP (MPTCP), a recent TCP extension, enables a transparent mobile handover by combining subflows on multiple interfaces, such as WiFi and LTE, to one logical connection. MPTCP provides multiple handover modes, which differ in their energy consumption and the performance during the handover. The Full-MPTCP mode uses permanently both WiFi and the mobile network, which increases energy consumption. The Single-Path mode establishes the mobile network connection after the WiFi connection broke, which leads to a short performance degradation. In this paper, we argue that this trade-off is not necessary. We propose to use the available (sensor) information to forecast the mobile handover. This allows switching to the Full-MPTCP mode before the WiFi connection breaks, providing both low energy consumption and high performance during the handover. For a first experimental evaluation, we use a declining WiFi link quality to forecast a handover. Our real world measurements show that both low energy consumption and high performance during the handover are possible at the same time.