Energy efficient dynamic load balancing in multipath TCP for mobile devices

Abstract

Over the last few years, one can observe a shift in preferences to use wireless media, including WiFi and cellular, rather than wired technologies for the communication purposes. On the other hand, a variant of TCP that allows for simultaneous transmission over different paths has been developed. This paper addresses the problem of optimal load distribution among the interfaces available at a networking device, e.g. mobile phone, with the objective of minimizing the overall energy consumption. A dynamic allocation algorithm, adapting to current, time-varying channel capacity is designed. Comparison with earlier approaches is provided and superiority of the proposed solution is demonstrated in numerical tests.