Energy efficient MPTCP transmission — Scheduler implementation and evaluation

Nowadays, if one purchases a communication device it is typically equipped with a few network interfaces. Similarly, a professional service in the Internet is run via a couple of interfaces to avoid a single point of failure. Despite the existence of many transmission paths, most of data is expedited and received by the same interfaces. The remaining ones serve as backup only, according to the premises of the fundamental transport protocol - TCP. Although networking devices allow for bundling channels, it is executed at the link layer and thus unusable in the Internet. This functional gap has been filled by a variant of TCP that permits simultaneous transmission over a few paths - Multipath TCP (MPTCP). MPTCP allows for spreading the application data stream among different interfaces or paths, yet the way the splitting is actually performed has not been standardized. This task can be optimized to satisfy various quality indicators. The paper presents a continuation of the work on energy-aware optimal load balancing method, addressing implementation issues in a real networking environment. A comparison with the reference solution is also provided.