Loss-Aware CMT-Based Multipathing Scheme for Efficient Data Delivery to Heterogeneous Wireless Networks

With the rapid development of wireless networks, multiple network interfaces are gradually being designed into more and more mobile devices. When it comes to data delivery, Stream Control Transmission Protocol (SCTP)-based Concurrent Multipath Transfer (CMT) has proven to be quite useful solution for multiple home networks, and it could become the key transport protocol for the next generation of wireless communications. The CMT delay caused by data rearrangement has been noticed by researchers, but they have seldom considered the frequent occurrence of packet loss that occurs in the high-loss networks. In this paper, we proposed an original loss-aware solution for multipath concurrent transmission (CMT-LA) that achieves the following goals: (1) identifying packet loss on all paths, (2) distributing packets adaptively across multiple available paths according to their packet loss and loss variation, and (3) maintaining the features of bandwidth aggregation and parallel transmission of CMT while improving the throughput performance. The results of our simulations showed that the proposed CMT-LA reduces reordering delay and unnecessary fast retransmissions, thereby demonstrating that CMT-LA is a more efficient data delivery scheme than classic CMT.