MAMS: Mobility-Aware Multipath Scheduler for MPQUIC

Multi-homing technologies are promising to support seamless handoff and non-interrupted transmissions. Scheduling packets across multiple paths, however, has the known issue of out-of-order (OFO) due to the heterogeneity of the paths, which is detrimental to users’ quality of experience (QoE). Wireless link characteristics undergo a fast change over time in mobile environments, thus aggravating the OFO issue. In this paper, we present a novel mobility-aware multipath QUIC (MMQUIC) framework in which interactions between link and transport layers are introduced so that the scheduler at a mobile sender is aware of uplink variations, and a new ACK packet structure is designed to inform the scheduler of downlink variations when the receiver is mobile. Based on MMQUIC, a Mobility-Aware Multipath Scheduler (MAMS) is developed, which forecasts the path conditions in successive time slots based on historical and current end-to-end (E2E) path conditions, along with wireless uplink/downlink conditions, and pre-allocates packets on multiple paths accordingly. We conduct a series of experiments to evaluate the performance of MAMS using network simulator 3 (ns-3). Simulation results demonstrate that MAMS effectively leverages the information related to mobility, achieving substantial performance gains w.r.t. the goodput and packet delay distribution under different mobility patterns.