Multipath Tcp Scheduling For Thin Streams: Active Probing And One-Way Delay-Awareness

Multipath TCP (MPTCP) is a recent TCP evolution that uses multiple TCP subflows and thereby different network paths for a single MPTCP connection. The MPTCP scheduler has a significant impact on the overall performance of MPTCP, as it maps outgoing packets on TCP subflows.In this paper, we identify limitations of today's MPTCP schedulers for thin streams. We present a novel MPTCP scheduler which overcomes today's limitations for thin streams by using i) active probing of unused subflows and ii) timely one-way delay information. A systematic evaluation within our MPTCP Linux Kernel implementation shows that our novel scheduler outperforms established MPTCP schedulers with regard to application-layer round-trip time without sacrificing efficiency and throughput.