A Study of Fair Bandwidth Sharing with AIMD-Based Multipath Congestion Control

The multi-homed capability offers a good opportunity to explore multipath transmission. To ensure fair bandwidth sharing between multipath flows and legacy single-path flows, congestion control is an essential mechanism at the transport layer to regulate traffic flows for bandwidth consumption. However, in a multipath scenario, the congestion control algorithm of the dominant transport control protocol (TCP) may result in too aggressive behavior. In this paper, we consider the generic congestion control principle of additive increase and multiplicative decrease (AIMD) and investigate two AIMD-based multipath congestion control solutions. We derive the conditions for AIMD parameters to ensure TCP-friendliness and satisfy two constraints for fair bandwidth sharing between multipath and single-path flows. Simulation results demonstrate that the AIMD-based multipath solutions well achieve the fairness goals.