Improvement of data scheduling mechanism in concurrent multipath data transfer

In this paper, we investigate the problem of receive buffer blocking in concurrent multipath data transfer (CMT) under heterogeneous wireless network environments. Buffer blocking problem can lead to bandwidth utilization of each path imbalance, which significantly degrades the performance of CMT using Stream Control Transmission Protocol (CMT-SCTP). A novel improved round-robin data scheduling mechanism is proposed, which aims to enhance the transmission efficiency. It estimates the network condition of each path according to the round trip time (RTT) and congestion window (cwnd). Then it proactively allocates the transmission task. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme can effectively reduce the out-of-order chunks and mitigate the buffer blocking problem in receiver end. And we also find that the proposed scheme can adapt to different network conditions.