A reliable alternating multi-path transmission control protocol scheduling for bandwidth aggregation performance

The Multi-Path Transmission Control Protocol is a new generation protocol for the transport layer which allows multihomed devices to exploit simultaneously their own interfaces. This feature would normally lead to some high-performance achievement in regard to regular TCP. However, the heterogeneous paths might cause the occurrence of the 'out-of-order' problem which requires the intervention of a more efficient scheduler to reach a high level of global bandwidth utilization. Since scheduling plays a key role in performance improvements, several studies have been implemented exploiting this idea, namely those that adopt the reactive approach and those others adopting the proactive one. In this paper, our goal is to improve the multipath throughput. The testbed experimentation consists primarily in the evaluation and analysis of the behaviour of different recent scheduling approaches with an asymmetric paths topology. Then, we propose an alternating scheduling approach which shed the light on bandwidth utilization. The results show that this approach is a more efficient solution than taking the reactive and proactive ones separately as it is based on a preliminary study that we conducted on the main performance and reliability parameters and has been implemented in the asymmetric multipath networks. This technique has led to a smart scheduling that provides a high level of throughput aggregation.