A Survey of Multipath TCP Scheduling Schemes: Open Challenges and
Potential Enablers
Abstract
Today, mobile devices like smartphones are supported with various
wireless radio interfaces including cellular (3G/4G/LTE) and Wi-Fi (IEEE
802.11) [42]. The legacy devices can only communicate with only one
interface. The Transmission Control Protocol, or TCP, has a limitation
inability to change connection settings without breaking the connection.
In this paper, we explain how multi-path TCP (MPTCP) protocol has been
proposed to solve TCP single-interface limitation and provides a huge
improvement on application performance by using multiple paths
transparently (auto path changing). We discuss the last mile, which is
the final networking segment that carried all network traffic. Indeed,
the available bandwidth in last-mile link can effectively harm the
network throughput as it limits the amount of transmitted data. We found
that the quality of the last mile networks significantly determines the
reliability and quality of the carrying network. We believe MPTCP can
provide a convenient solution for the last mile problem. We provide a
holistic view of the challenges and potential enablers in details.