Delay-Based Congestion Control for Multipath TCP in Heterogeneous Wireless Networks

Abstract

The advancements in communication technologies enable mobile terminals to simultaneously receive traffic with multiple radio interfaces. Multipath transmission control protocol (MPTCP) exploits the multihoming feature of mobile terminals to implement concurrent multipath transfer over heterogeneous wireless networks. In this paper, we propose a delay-based congestion control algorithm (DBCCA) for MPTCP to optimise the transmission performance. The proposed algorithm mainly includes two steps. First, a constrained optimization problem is formed to minimize the delay difference of different paths and a near-optimal rate distribution vector is obtained with genetic algorithm. Second, we adjust the congestion windows based on the acquired rate distribution vector and the round-trip time to distribute traffic over each path. Jointly considering the throughput and the delay, DBCCA effectively optimizes mobile traffic transmission in heterogeneous networking environment. Experimental results show that DBCCA shifts part of traffic from the higher loss paths to the lower ones, which significantly improves throughput.