Towards autonomic multipath transport for infotainment-like systems

Multi-homed devices are more and more used in the current Internet, and all kinds of multimedia and other real time applications are expected to be distributed between them through different access network (WiFi, UMTS, etc.). To tackle the challenge that consists in providing a sufficient enough QoS to the final mobile users, several attempts have been and are still currently done at the Transport level. One one side, the goal is to define how to make use of the different interfaces available at the device level. On the other side, it is to define how to configure dynamically and autonomously a new generation of multi-path Transport protocols aimed at fitting as best as possible the QoS requirements and the network constraints. Towards this goal, this paper provides contributions aimed at illustrating how the autonomic computing concept may be applied within a multi-path Transport protocol with the aim to provided an as high as possible QoS for infotainment-like video applications distributed between mobiles and multi homed devices. The focus is done on the exploration of a new QoS-aware load balancing mechanism and on the benefits that could be done when the network context changes, by plugging in dynamically into an autonomic multi homed Transport protocol.