Improved heterogeneous network utilization by combining multipath transport with QoS-based flow management and routing

QoS/QoE becomes increasingly important due to the growing usage of multimedia applications. In this paper, a solution is presented where Multipath TCP which supports the mobility on the transport layer is combined with QoS-enabled OSPF for performance-aware route selection. For the latter protocol, a novel extension called QoSxOSPF-LSFM (Load Sensitive Flow Management) is introduced which increases the stability of OSPFxQoS routing by evaluating the link utilization and reducing the frequency of route changes. For comparison, results are shown for the combination of QoSxOSPF-LSFM both with MPTCP as a multipath-capable transport-layer based approach as well as with Mobile IP which is a network layer based mobility approach. Simulation results prove the increase of performance compared to the case without LSFM extensions both for MPTCP and Mobile IP; however, due to the multipath capabilities, MPTCP in all cases outperforms Mobile IP.