A performance analysis study of multipath routing in a hybrid network with mobile users

Mobile communication platforms of individual agents and ground vehicles, ships and aircrafts of both civil and military services often operate in highly dynamic conditions with constantly changing infrastructure and access to communication resources. Efficient techniques for rapid and yet stable communication of such fleets with their control centres and between cooperating vehicles within the fleet is a challenging but important area of study with the potential to facilitate the analysis and design of efficient and robust communication systems. Multipath extensions of data transmission protocols aim to take advantage of path diversity to achieve efficient and robust bandwidth allocation while maintaining stability. Such multipath resource pooling extensions of routing and congestion control intrinsically implement decentralisation with implicit resource sharing. In this paper, we build on the recent theoretical work on fluid model approximations of multipath TCP and study their application to the scenarios in which a convoy with two communication nodes (representing the convoy's head and tail) establishes channels with a set of radio/WiFi towers and a satellite relaying information to a remote destination; these channels have time-varying capacities which depend on the position and dynamics of the convoy. The paper studies the performance of a multipath TCP controller and demonstrates how path diversity can be implicitly utilised to spread flows across available paths. Furthermore, we study the patterns of sub-flows governed by dynamic control according to the motion of the convoy and investigate the trade-offs between resource utilisation and the speed of response by the sub-flows.