Accelerating Multipath Transport Through Balanced Subflow Completion

Abstract

Simultaneously using multiple network paths (e.g., WiFi and cellular) is an attractive feature on mobile devices. A key component in a multipath system such as MPTCP is the scheduler, which determines how to distribute the traffic over multiple paths. In this paper, we propose DEMS, a new multipath scheduler aiming at reducing the data chunk download time. DEMS consists of three key design decisions: (1) being aware of the chunk boundary and strategically decoupling the paths for chunk delivery, (2) ensuring simultaneous subflow completion at the receiver side, and (3) allowing a path to trade a small amount of redundant data for performance. We have implemented DEMS on smartphones and evaluated it over both emulated and real cellular/WiFi networks. DEMS is robust to diverse network conditions and brings significant performance boost compared to the default MPTCP scheduler (e.g., median download time reduction of 33%--48% for fetching files and median loading time reduction of 6%--43% for fetching web pages), and even more benefits compared to other state-of-the-art schedulers.