A novel trunk scheduling for concurrent multipath transfer in heterogeneous wireless networks

Concurrent multipath transfer (CMT) can improve data throughput, bandwidth resource utilization and system robustness. Whereas, CMT also leads to serious reordering problem, especially in heterogeneous wireless networks. Since more than one path are used, an efficient CMT scheduling algorithm is needed at the sender. For existing packet scheduling, packet´s rate of entering the sender queue is usually faster than that of leaving the queue. Then the packet scheduled with the information of this moment has to wait in the sender queue, and will be transmitted into the network after a period of time. In this case, the scheduler is generally out of date. To solve this problem, we introduce trunk as the scheduling unit instead of packet. By estimating trunk´s receiving time at the receiver, the trunk scheduling scheme is decided. Simulation results verify that the trunk scheduling algorithm outperforms existing packet scheduling algorithms in terms of throughput, average end to end delay, and average reorder delay.