OCPS: Offset Compensation based Packet Scheduling mechanism for multipath TCP

As terminals are equipped with multiple interfaces and allowed to access heterogeneous networks, transferring data simultaneously through all the available paths becomes possible and also brings many benefits. Multipath TCP (MPTCP) distributes an application stream over different TCP connections. Since different paths have disparate latencies, out-of-order packets problem occurs at receiver. Large number of these packets exhaust the limited receive buffer and make the receive window stall, which greatly degrade the throughput. Thus, a scheduling mechanism plays an important role to keep in-order delivery. Previous intelligent scheduling mechanisms schedule data independently each time and doesn't utilize the feedback carried in acknowledgements, which lose flexibility. Our Offset Compensation based Packet Scheduling (OCPS) mechanism gets feedback information from SACK options and gains the knowledge of whether last scheduling round still causes out-of-order problem. Then it modifies the scheduling next round accordingly by using an offset. The simulation results illustrate our mechanism enhance throughput and reduce cache occupancy at receiver.