Low-Latency Scheduling in MPTCP

• The demand for mobile communication is continuously increasing, and mobile devices are now the communication device of choice for many people. To guarantee connectivity and performance, mobile devices are typically equipped with multiple interfaces. To this end, exploiting multiple available interfaces is also a crucial aspect of the upcoming 5G standard for reducing costs, easing network management, and providing a good user experience. Multi-path protocols, such as multi-path TCP (MPTCP), can be used to provide performance optimization through load-balancing and resilience to coverage drops and link failures, however, they do not automatically guarantee better performance. For instance, low-latency communication has been proven hard to achieve when a device has network interfaces with asymmetric capacity and delay (e.g., LTE and WLAN). For multi-path communication, the data scheduler is vital to provide low latency, since it decides over which network interface to send individual data segments. In this paper, we focus on the MPTCP scheduler with the goal of providing a good user experience for latency-sensitive applications when interface quality is asymmetric. After an initial assessment of existing scheduling algorithms, we present two novel scheduling techniques: the block estimation (BLEST) scheduler and the shortest transmission time first (STTF) scheduler. BLEST and STTF are compared with existing schedulers in both emulated and real-world environments and are shown to reduce web object transmission times with up to 51% and provide 45% faster communication for interactive applications, compared with MPTCP's default scheduler.

Ämnesord

TEKNIK OCH TEKNOLOGIER  -- Elektroteknik och elektronik (hsv//swe)

ENGINEERING AND TECHNOLOGY  -- Electrical Engineering, Electronic Engineering, Information Engineering (hsv//eng)

Nyckelord

asymmetric paths.

low-latency

MPTCP

scheduling

Transport protocols

Mobile telecommunication systems

Scheduling algorithms

Wireless telecommunication systems

asymmetric paths

Interactive applications

Low latency

Low-latency communication

Performance optimizations

Real world environments

5G mobile communication systems

Computer Science

Datavetenskap

Publikations- och innehållstyp

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