On implementation of energy-aware MPTCP scheduler

Abstract

The majority of networking devices currently available are equipped with a few communication interfaces. However, in most cases, only one of them is used for data transfer as dictated by the design premises of the fundamental transport protocol – TCP. Recently, a variant of TCP – Multipath TCP (MPTCP) – that allows for simultaneous transmission over different paths has been developed. While it allows for spreading the data stream among different interfaces and paths, the way it is actually performed has been left for further investigation. The stream splitting can be optimized according to different quality indicators. The paper discusses the implementation properties of an energy-aware load balancing method tested in a physical networking environment. A comparison with the reference solution is also provided.