Receiver-driven cooperation-based concurrent multipath transfer over heterogeneous wireless networks

Abstract

The advantages of employing SCTP-based Concurrent Multipath Transfer (CMT) have been demonstrated to be very useful for data delivery over multi-homed wireless networks. However, there is still significant ongoing work addressing some remaining limitations and challenges. The most important concern when applying CMT to data delivery is related to handling packet reordering and buffer blocking. Another concern on this topic is that current sender-based CMT solutions seldom consider balancing the overhead and sharing the load between the sender and receiver. This paper proposes a novel Receiver-driven Cooperation-based Concurrent Multipath Transfer solution (CMT-Rev) with the following aims: (i) to balance overhead and share load between the sender and receiver, by moving some functions including congestion and flow control from the sender onto receiver; (ii) to mitigate the data reordering and buffer blocking problems, by using an adaptive receiver-cooperative path aggregation model, (iii) to adaptively transmit packets over multiple paths according to their receiver-inspired sending rate values, by employing a new receiver-aware data distribution scheduler. Simulation results show that CMT-Rev outperforms the existing CMT solutions in terms of data delivery performance.