Adaptive Load Balancing Algorithm for multi-homing mobile nodes in local domain

In a wireless domain where a mobile user accesses heterogeneous wireless technologies with multiple interfaces, a multi-path scheduling algorithm can benefit mobile users' experience by aggregating different network bandwidth together. However, existing literature actually shows that for TCP flows, it may not be the case. To better exploit multi-path scheduling for TCP connections, this paper presents a multi-path scheduling algorithm named Adaptive Load Balancing Algorithm (ALBAM) to split traffic across different network access for these multi-homed users. Unlike other multi-path scheduling algorithms, ALBAM takes full advantage of the infrastructure of wireless domain and it has the following advantages: (1) it does not involve any upgrade of protocol stack on user devices. (2) ALBAM does not introduce any protocol signaling cost into the bandwidth-constrained wireless networks. (3) ALBAM reduces the number of out-of-order packets. Thus, ALBAM improves the throughput of the TCP connections. To evaluate the performance of ALBAM, we conduct comparative simulations of ALBAM against a related technique, i.e. Opportunistic Multipath Scheduling. The results show that ALBAM can achieve good bandwidth aggregation and provide better performance to TCP connections in the wireless domain.