Bandwidth-Need Driven Energy Efficiency Improvement of MPTCP Users in Wireless Networks

Multipath TCP (MPTCP) enables mobile devices to aggregate bandwidth from multiple wireless connections and own better mobility resilience but incurs additional energy consumption. Such a fact drives the research to find the energy-efficient access manner under MPTCP-based multipath access in wireless networks. However, existing work largely focuses on energy efficiency only and is agnostic to the bandwidth need of mobile devices. Therefore, in this paper, we propose to handle this gap by integrating the improvement of energy efficiency into the process of satisfying the bandwidth need. First, our approach keeps using a single connection if the bandwidth need is satisfied. A novel method is proposed based on TCP throughput modeling for monitoring bandwidth shortage when the client uses only a single connection. Second, when more bandwidth is needed, our approach does not turn to multipath access blindly but chooses the additional connection that has a potential in improving both energy efficiency and throughput. Third, when multipath is used, our approach keeps evaluating the necessity of switching back to using a single path based on the bandwidth need and energy efficiency. The three steps form a loop to continually assist mobile devices to balance bandwidth need and energy efficiency. Intensive experiments show that compared with using MPTCP on mobile devices directly, this method greatly improves energy efficiency while keeping bandwidth needs satisfied.