Mitigating Receiver's Buffer Blocking by Delay Aware Packet Scheduling in Multipath Data Transfer

Abstract

Reliable in order multipath data transfer under asymmetric heterogeneous network conditions has known problems related to receiver's buffer blocking, caused by out of order packet arrival. Several mitigation techniques have been proposed to address this issue mostly by using various packet retransmission schemes, load-balancing and bandwidth-estimation based mechanisms. In comparison to the existing reactive techniques for buffer block mitigation, we propose a novel and yet simpler to implement, delay aware packet scheduling scheme for multipath data transfer over asymmetric network paths, that proactively minimizes the blocking inside receiver's buffer. Our initial simulation results show that, in comparison to the default round robin packet scheduler, by using our proposed delay aware packet scheduling scheme, we can significantly improve overall performance while notably minimizing the receiver's buffer usage, which is also beneficial for multi-homed hand-held mobile devices with limited buffering capacity, which, due to their multi-homing and heterogeneous wireless network features (i.e. availability of 3G and Wi-Fi) are also one of the most common use cases for multi-path transport.