Synchronizing Scheduler for MPTCP Transmission of Streaming Content

Providing an efficient service of time-sensitive data transfer plays an essential role in entertainment, personal, and business communication, and industry, especially in the systems of monitoring and robotic automation. Those applications require high network throughput and short latency, rarely available within one data channel. Until recently, nonhomogeneous channels could not have been concurrently engaged owing to the protocol legacy restrictions. In order to answer the current challenges, new protocols, e.g., Multipath TCP (MPTCP), have been designed. MPTCP splits the data stream over a number of channels in the way dictated by a low-level component – the scheduler. However, the default scheduler aims at increasing throughput rather than constraining the transfer delay. Thus, for time-sensitive applications, other solutions are needed. In this work, a new scheduler, explicitly targeting the transmission aspects related to protocol delay, is designed. The scheduler properties are analyzed formally and its performance is tested experimentally.