Network-Side Multipath Access Management in Wireless Networks with Software-Defined Networking

The emergence of multipath transmission control protocol (MPTCP) enables mobile devices to use multiple wireless network access paths simultaneously. However, we find that unconstrained multipath users could negatively impact the performance of wireless networks in terms of throughput and fairness. Meanwhile, when solving this issue, it is desirable to keep the multipath access as much as possible due to its attractive benefits. Therefore, in this paper, we first identify a solution strategy that can effectively balance the network performance and multipath benefits. We then implement the strategy through a software-defined networking based bandwidth usage management system. Our method identifies a primary path for each multipath user. When congestion happens at an access point, non-primary connections of multipath users are suppressed, thus protecting the network performance. Otherwise, no intervention is imposed, which offers maximal benefits to multipath users. Thus, multipath access is dynamically scaled to achieve a balance between the two aforementioned goals. This process is done in a repetitive manner to be adaptive to user dynamism (e.g., mobility). The proposed solution strategy and system apply to both downlink and uplink traffic. Extensive real deployment experiment and NS3 simulation with Linux Kernel MPTCP implementation demonstrate our findings as well as the effectiveness of the proposed solution.