A Transport Protocol to Exploit Multipath Diversity in Wireless Networks

Abstract—Wireless networks (including wireless mesh networks) provide opportunities for using multiple paths. Multihoming of hosts, possibly using different technologies and providers, also makes it attractive for end-to-end transport connections to exploit multiple paths. In this paper, we propose a multi-path transport protocol, based on a carefully crafted set of enhancements to TCP, that effectively utilizes the available bandwidth and diversity provided by heterogeneous, lossy wireless paths. Our Multi-Path LOss-Tolerant (MPLOT) transport protocol can be used to obtain significant goodput gains in wireless networks, subject to bursty, correlated losses with average loss-rates as high as 50%. MPLOT is built around the principle of separability of reliability and congestion control functions in an end-to-end transport protocol. Congestion control is performed separately on individual paths and the reliability mechanism works over the aggregate set of paths available for an end-to...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2012
• Where: TON
• Authors: Vicky Sharma, Koushik Kar, K. K. Ramakrishnan, Shivkumar Kalyanaraman
• Keywords: Congestion Control, Mesh Networks, Programming Languages, Test Scenarios, TON 2012