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An adaptive multi-path data transfer approach for MP-TCP

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Abstract

Multi-path Transmission Control Protocol (MP-TCP) Coupled Congestion Control algorithm focuses on amalgamating the increased BandWidth (BW) of multiple available links while avoiding MP-TCP’s higher aggressiveness in comparison to usual TCP flows on every utilized link. Therefore, this leads to exceedingly conventional behavior when the network paths do not share a congested link. Further, the situation worsens when the network paths possess varying characteristics (i.e., available BW, Packet Loss Rate (PLR), and delay), leading to incurring overheads such as higher re-ordering, buffer-blocking, and needless retransmissions in the network. We observe that the presently implemented MP-TCP scheduler suffers from lower channel utilization due to its conventional congestion window (cwnd) adaptation scheme. As a result, the protocol compromises application-level throughput performance. To address these issues, we propose an Adaptive-Data Scheduling Policy (A-DSP), which dynamically adjusts the cwnd growth according to the paths’ Round Trip Time (RTT) variations. To regulate the transmission rate of each path concerning its assessed RTT variation, we design and implement an adaptive fast retransmission policy as well. The evaluations indicate that A-DSP decreases the File Transfer Time by over 50% compared to the MP-TCP scheduler. We also observe throughput performance gains of up to 46%, 19%, and 34% for different PLR, BW, and path delay values, respectively, compared to MP-TCP. Moreover, A-DSP also offers considerable performance improvement compared to other multi-path approaches.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer & Communication Engineering, School of Computing & Information Technology, Manipal University Jaipur, Jaipur, India

    Lal Pratap Verma

  2. Department of Computer Science and Engineering, The LNM Institute of Information Technology, Jaipur, Rajasthan, India

    Varun Kumar Sharma

  3. Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Jaypee University of Engineering and Technology, Guna, Raghogarh-Vijaypur, India

    Mahesh Kumar

  4. University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand

    Aniket Mahanti

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  1. Lal Pratap Verma
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Correspondence to Varun Kumar Sharma.

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Verma, L.P., Sharma, V.K., Kumar, M. et al. An adaptive multi-path data transfer approach for MP-TCP. Wireless Netw 28, 2185–2212 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11276-022-02958-2

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