A Data-Scheduling Mechanism for Multi-Homed Mobile Terminals with Disparate Link Latencies

A mobile terminal equipped with multiple network interfaces can often be found under coverage of multiple access networks. Multihoming enables mobile terminals to communicate simultaneously through multiple interfaces. Connection-oriented transport layer mechanisms ensure reliable, in-order delivery of data, however parallel data transfers in multihoming face problems due to out-of-order reception of data which causes fast-retransmissions and limit the communication throughput. In this paper, we propose a transport layer based mechanism which stripes one flow´´s data across multiple disjoint paths efficiently, reducing possible occurrence of out-of-order data. Our mechanism estimates arrival times of data packets to be sent through available paths in an association, and decides which packets are to be sent through each path. We compared our mechanism with a relatively closer approach called Westwood SCTP. We illustrate with the help of simulation results that our mechanism proves to improve multipath communication.