Exploring Mobile/WiFi Handover with Multipath TCP

Thu, 06/07/2012 - 11:22 by Gregory Detal

Abstract

Mobile Operators see an unending growth of data traffic generated by their
customers on their mobile data networks. As the operators start to have a hard
time carrying all this traffic over 3G or 4G networks, offloading to WiFi is
being considered. Multipath TCP (MPTCP) is an evolution of TCP that allows the
simultaneous use of multiple interfaces for a single connection while still
presenting a standard TCP socket API to the application. The protocol
specification of Multipath TCP has foreseen the different building blocks to
allow transparent handover from WiFi to 3G back and forth.

In this paper we experimentally prove the feasibility of using MPTCP for
mobile/WiFi handover in the current Internet. Our experiments run over real
WiFi/3G networks and use our Linux kernel implementation of MPTCP that we
enhanced to better support handover.

We analyze MPTCP's energy consumption and handover performance in various
operational modes. We find that MPTCP enables smooth handovers offering
reasonable performance even for very demanding applications such as VoIP.

Finally, our experiments showed that lost MPTCP control signals can adversely
affect handover performance; we implement and test a simple but effective
solution to this issue.

Authors
Christoph Paasch, Gregory Detal, Fabien Duchene, Costin Raiciu and Olivier Bonaventure
Source
ACM SIGCOMM workshop on Cellular Networks (Cellnet'12), 2012.
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