A round-trip-time based concurrent transmission scheduling for MPTCP

Abstract

Multipath Transmission Control Protocol (MPTCP) promises to aggregate concurrent and multiple communications interfaces to improve data transmission rate. There is, however, an open issue of flow management under highly asymmetric condition where the throughput may degrade. This paper proposes an algorithm for flow scheduling in the sender to minimize the degree of out-of-order packets arriving in the receiver. The Round Trip Times (RTTs) of each path of a MPTCP connection are taken into traffic allocation over subflows. Simulations are conducted by extending the MPTCP open source modules for the NS2 tool set. It is found that the proposed algorithm is superior to a traditional Round-Robin (RR) technique in both buffer size and effective throughput.