Alternative Scheduling Decisions for Multipath TCP

In this letter, we discuss the impact of packet scheduling decisions on the performance of Multipath Transmission Control Protocol (MPTCP) flows. We propose, implement, and evaluate three alternative schedulers, namely, Highest Sending Rate (HSR), Largest Window Space (LWS) and Lowest Time/Space (LTS). We evaluate and compare them to the current MPTCP’s scheduler, Lowest Latency (LL), in an experimental environment. To analyze the performance of the multipath throughput improvement of these schedulers, we conducted a vast set of 40 different experiments that combine homogeneous and heterogeneous link parameterizations, considering packet loss rate, delay, and transmission rate. Experimental results showed that the proposed alternatives achieved a higher performance than LL in most of the experiments, allowing better alternatives for improving multipath throughput with paths under loss, delay, and varied transmission rates.