ADPSM: An Adaptive Delay-based Packet Splitting Mechanism for Concurrent Multipath Transfer over heterogeneous paths

Concurrent Multipath Transfer (CMT) using multiple paths for simultaneous parallel transmission is a promising technology in next generation mobile networks, especially for bandwidth-hungry services. Due to the multi-homing feature of Stream Control Transmission Protocol (SCTP), researchers proposed to extend it to support CMT in order to distribute packets within the same flow over independent homogeneous paths. However, CMT over heterogeneous paths may cause the packet “reordering” problem in the receiver buffer and deteriorate the data delivery efficiency. To address this issue, we propose an Adaptive Delay-based Packet Splitting Mechanism (ADPSM) for CMT over heterogeneous paths. ADPSM defines an adaptive variable called sliding delay threshold to pick out the candidate set from all heterogeneous paths and distribute new arriving packets to the target path with minimum delay. Simulation results show that ADPSM mechanism is better than original CMT-SCTP with respect to the in-order packets arrival and average throughput, especially in the case of a low receiver buffer size.