An Adaptive Fault-Tolerant Transmission Mechanism for CMT in Unreliable Wireless Networks

Concurrent multipath transfer (CMT) using SCTP can improve the transmission ability of multi-homed devices such as smartphones and laptops with multiple heterogeneous network interfaces. However, the unreliable nature of wireless network makes the performance of concurrent multipath transfer significantly worsen. To address this issue, we propose an adaptive fault-tolerant transmission mechanism to reduce the impact brought by packet loss, which tries to avoid chunk retransmission with specialized forward error correction and adjusts the redundant rate dynamically according to the transmission loss rate. A chunk forwarding algorithms for CMT is also presented to minimize the impact of long-term path error. The simulation results demonstrate that the proposed fault-tolerant transmission mechanism outperforms the standard SCTP and CMT association in most scenarios, especially in unreliable networks.