Multi-path TCP Congestion Control for Streaming Services in Wireless Network

Multipath TCP (MPTCP) has just been completed the standardization by IETF. MPTCP is designed to be backward compatible with regular TCP, and its performance is equivalent to that of a regular TCP flow on the best path for it. However, MITCP has performance degradation similar to that the regular TCP does, because MITCP is extended based on the regular TCP. Especially, the performance of TCP decreases in unreliable wireless network environment. TCP Westwood and SQRT TCP have been proposed for streaming transmission in wireless network. In this paper, we use the characteristics similar to those schemes. However, there are some problems that the TCP Westwood and SQRT TCP cannot fairly use the resources and properly distribute the load to multipath, because these schemes are designed for single-path transmission. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a multipath transmission scheme which improves TCP Westwood and SQRT TCP congestion control algorithms. The proposed scheme demonstrates that its performance is equivalent to that of a regular TCP flow on the best path for it, and is a well-suited method to solve the above mentioned problems. The results from extensive simulations show that the proposed SMITCP outperforms the existing TCP Westwood and SQRT TCP, and also achieves the goals of MITCP (i.e., improved throughput, fairness, load balancing).