Avoiding Biased-Feeding in the Scheduling of Collaborative Multipath TCP

PLoS One. 2016 Aug 16;11(8):e0161213. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0161213. eCollection 2016.

Abstract

Smartphones have become the major communication and portable computing devices that access the Internet through Wi-Fi or mobile networks. Unfortunately, users without a mobile data subscription can only access the Internet at limited locations, such as hotspots. In this paper, we propose a collaborative bandwidth sharing protocol (CBSP) built on top of MultiPath TCP (MPTCP). CBSP enables users to buy bandwidth on demand from neighbors (called Helpers) and uses virtual interfaces to bind the subflows of MPTCP to avoid modifying the implementation of MPTCP. However, although MPTCP provides the required multi-homing functionality for bandwidth sharing, the current packet scheduling in collaborative MPTCP (e.g., Co-MPTCP) leads to the so-called biased-feeding problem. In this problem, the fastest link might always be selected to send packets whenever it has available cwnd, which results in other links not being fully utilized. In this work, we set out to design an algorithm, called Scheduled Window-based Transmission Control (SWTC), to improve the performance of packet scheduling in MPTCP, and we perform extensive simulations to evaluate its performance.

MeSH terms

  • Computer Communication Networks / statistics & numerical data*
  • Internet / economics
  • Internet / statistics & numerical data*
  • Wireless Technology / economics
  • Wireless Technology / statistics & numerical data

Grants and funding

This research was partially supported by the Ministry of Science and Technology, Taiwan, R.O.C., under the grant numbers: MOST 104-2221-E-006-041- and MOST 104-2221-E-006-024-, https://www.most.gov.tw. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. There was no specific funding for the rest of this project. There was no additional external funding received for this study.