IoT Traffic Offloading with MultiPath TCP

The concept of a fully connected world in the fifth generation technology envisions the massive rollout of small and constrained Internet of Things (IoT) devices. In such IoT environments, machine-to-machine (M2M) communications is key for allowing these devices (e.g., sensors, actuators, smart meters/monitors) to collect data toward a remote server. We address this particular scenario by building and evaluating an IoT multi-access reference architecture, with a multipath TCP (MPTCP) gateway connected to multiple cellular networks to offload M2M data traffic. Experimental results from CoAP-emulated traffic indicate that the our proposed system together with the benefits of MPTCP improve IoT application performance. More specifically, multipath-based M2M data traffic offloading increases throughput and significantly reduces latency of CoAP requests as the number of sensor networks increases.