MULTIPATH TCP IN WIRELESS NETWORKS

Author

Mijanur R. Palash, Southern Illinois University CarbondaleFollow

Date of Award

5-1-2018

Degree Name

Master of Science

Department

Electrical and Computer Engineering

First Advisor

Chen, Kang

Abstract

Multipath TCP (MPTCP) is a new modification of TCP protocol which enables a client to transfer data over multiple paths simultaneously under a single TCP connection, for improved throughput and fault resilience. However, MPTCP is susceptible to some major drawbacks when applied in a wireless network. We found several cases where, despite improving individual MPTCP clients throughput, MPTCP reduces the capacity of the overall wireless network due to the mac level fairness and contention-based access schemes. Additionally, even if the bandwidth improves, employing Multipath TCP (MPTCP) in wireless networks can be energy inecient due to additional energy consumption by multiple interfaces. This creates a dilemma between bandwidth improvement and energy efficiency. This thesis research aims to solve these important issues for MPTCP in the wireless environment. We analyzed the root cause of these drawbacks and identified instances where they can arise. Two novel schemes denoted MPWiFi and kMPTCP, are developed to solve the bandwidth degradation and energy efficiency issues respectively, while maintaining the promised benefitts of MPTCP. The MPWiFi assigns dierent priorities to the subflows and aggressively suppresses some of them based on some design logic. Similarly, kMPTCP adds an additional multipath subflow only if the bandwidth requirement can't be fulllled by single path and the new subflow meets the data rate and signal strength condition. Moreover, kMPTCP keeps additional subflows as long as the signal strength remains in good range and this subflow remain mandatory to provide the necessary bandwidth to the application. These two schemes have been implemented along with Linux Kernel MPTCP implementation. Extensive real-world deployment and NS3 simulation show that the proposed schemes can eectively alleviate the adverse impacts of the MPTCP based multipath access in Wireless networks.