Reducing the Flow Completion Time for Multipath TCP

Abstract

The modern mobile devices are typically equipped with multiple network interfaces, e.g., 4G LTE, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, but the current implementation of TCP can support only a single path at the same time. The Multipath TCP (MPTCP) leverages the multipath feature and provides (i) robust connection by utilizing another interface if the current connection is lost and (ii) higher throughput than single path TCP by simultaneously leveraging multiple network paths. However, if the performance between the multiple paths are significantly diverse, the receiver may have to wait for packets from the slower path, causing reordering and buffering problems. To solve this problem, previous MPTCP schedulers mainly focused on predicting the latency of the path beforehand. Recent studies, however, have shown that the path latency varies by a large margin over time, thus the MPTCP scheduler may wrongly predict the path latency, causing performance degradation. In this paper, we propose a new MPTCP scheduler called, choose fastest subflow (CFS) scheduler to solve this problem. Rather than predicting the path latency, CFS utilizes the characteristics of these paths to reduce the overall flow completion time by redundantly sending the last part of the flow to both paths. We compare the performance through real testbed experiments that implements CFS. The experimental results on both synthetic packet generation and actual Web page requests, show that CFS consistently outperforms the previous proposals in all cases.