A Packet Partition Scheduling Mechanism for Bandwidth Aggregation over Multiple Paths

This paper proposes a packet partition scheduling mechanism for bandwidth aggregation over end-to-end multi-path through multiple network interfaces. The proposed mechanism effectively partitions packets on the appropriate end-to-end path through the corresponding network interface. Each network interface is considered to have a partition counter associated with it. This partition counter varied by both weighted capacity and partitioned packets is used to determine if a network interface has enough credits to partition incoming packets on multiple paths. The capacity unit is shown to be a useful design parameter to make the performance of the proposed mechanism as good as possible. Through computer simulations, it is shown that the proposed mechanism can partition well randomly incoming packets for the multi-path communication and can outperform the simple weighted packet partition scheduling mechanism.