Performance Evaluation of Multipath TCP Scheduling Algorithms.

One of the goals of 5G is to provide enhanced mobile broadband and enable low latency in some use cases. To achieve this aim, the Internet Engineering Task Force has proposed the Multipath TCP by utilizing the feature of dual connectivity in 5G, where a 5G device can be served by two different base stations. However, the path heterogeneity between the 5G device and the server may cause a packet out-of-order problem. The researchers proposed a number of scheduling algorithms to tackle this issue. This paper introduces the existing algorithms, with the aim to make a thorough comparison between the existing scheduling algorithms and provide the guidelines for designing new scheduling algorithms in 5G, we have conducted an extensive set of emulation studies based on the real Linux experimental platform. The evaluation covers a wide range of network scenarios to investigate the impact of different network metrics, namely, RTT, buffer size, and file size on the performance of existing widely deployed scheduling algorithms.