Disco: A Framework for Dynamic Selection of Multipath Congestion Control Algorithms

Many mobile devices are usually equipped with multiple interfaces, providing the opportunity of using multipath transport protocols such as Multipath TCP (MPTCP) to boost performance. The multipath congestion control algorithm (CCA) in MPTCP plays a vital role in achieving high performance and multipath fairness in mobile environments where the paths are often heterogeneous and dynamic. Such environments are very challenging for existing one-size-fits-all CCAs to achieve high performance while ensuring multipath fairness. In this paper, we present a novel framework, Disco, to dynamically select the most appropriate CCAs for MPTCP subflows at runtime according to the perceived network condition. Extensive experiments show that compared with existing multipath CCAs, the proposed solution can improve the average throughput by 19% – 25% and reduce the average queuing delay by up to 21 % while it barely does harm to multipath fairness.

I. Introduction

Nowadays, many mobile devices, are usually equipped with multiple network interfaces. To fully unleash the power of multiple network interfaces, multipath transport protocols are indispensable. At present, the most widely used standardized multipath transport protocol is Multipath TCP [1] (MPTCP), which is implemented in iOS and Linux.