Riassunto analitico
Nowadays mobile devices, like tablets and smartphones have undergone an exponential growth and include several interfaces to connect to different types of networks, such us cellular networks (UMTS or LTE), wireless local area networks belonging to the IEEE 802.11 family, and broadband metropolitan area networks (such us WiMAX). The Multi-Path Transport Control Protocol (MPTCP) is a modified version of the regular TCP to allow the simultaneous use of multiple paths for end-to-end communications. On one hand, MPTCP is extremely valuable to combine the use of different interfaces, on the other, it requires a great amount of energy. Since mobile devices are always energy constrained, it is therefore of paramount importance to investigate the behavior of energy-aware MPTCP solutions that allow to increase the battery lifetime of radio terminals. In this work, MPTCP is employed on wireless nodes equipped with one LTE and two IEEE 802.11 Wi-Fi interfaces, dynamically controlling the number of active MPTCP subflows. In greater detail, starting from initial condition where all available paths are employed, subflows are then gradually disabled according to the residual battery lifetime of the receiving wireless terminal, whose status is estimated using its measured current consumption. During several experimental tests, performed on the remotely available w-iLab.2 testbed in Ghent, different versions of Wi-Fi interfaces (IEEE 802.11a/g/n/ac) have been adopted, with the aim to obtain throughput improvements and to understand the MPTCP connection behavior. It has been demonstrated that, by shutting off the LTE connection first, then one of the two Wi-Fi interfaces next, it is possible to achieve an interesting increase in the lifetime of the terminal battery. Moreover, a further and interesting outcome concerns the inconsistent behavior of MPTCP connections when used with both 802.11n and 802.11ac Wi-Fi interfaces: despite being quite recent versions of the 802.11 family, it has been found that MPTCP connections with 802.11n/ac Wi-Fi paths do not provide throughput improvements as excellent as those obtained using 802.11n or 802.11ac Wi-Fi paths in regular TCP connections.
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Abstract
Nowadays mobile devices, like tablets and smartphones have undergone an exponential growth and include several interfaces to connect to different types of networks, such us cellular networks (UMTS or LTE), wireless local area networks belonging to the IEEE 802.11 family, and broadband metropolitan area networks (such us WiMAX). The Multi-Path Transport Control Protocol (MPTCP) is a modified version of the regular TCP to allow the simultaneous use of multiple paths for end-to-end communications. On one hand, MPTCP is extremely valuable to combine the use of different interfaces, on the other, it requires a great amount of energy. Since mobile devices are always energy constrained, it is therefore of paramount importance to investigate the behavior of energy-aware MPTCP solutions that allow to increase the battery lifetime of radio terminals. In this work, MPTCP is employed on wireless nodes equipped with one LTE and two IEEE 802.11 Wi-Fi interfaces, dynamically controlling the number of active MPTCP subflows. In greater detail, starting from initial condition where all available paths are employed, subflows are then gradually disabled according to the residual battery lifetime of the receiving wireless terminal, whose status is estimated using its measured current consumption. During several experimental tests, performed on the remotely available w-iLab.2 testbed in Ghent, different versions of Wi-Fi interfaces (IEEE 802.11a/g/n/ac) have been adopted, with the aim to obtain throughput improvements and to understand the MPTCP connection behavior. It has been demonstrated that, by shutting off the LTE connection first, then one of the two Wi-Fi interfaces next, it is possible to achieve an interesting increase in the lifetime of the terminal battery. Moreover, a further and interesting outcome concerns the inconsistent behavior of MPTCP connections when used with both 802.11n and 802.11ac Wi-Fi interfaces: despite being quite recent versions of the 802.11 family, it has been found that MPTCP connections with 802.11n/ac Wi-Fi paths do not provide throughput improvements as excellent as those obtained using 802.11n or 802.11ac Wi-Fi paths in regular TCP connections.
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