Reduce delay of multipath TCP in IoT networks

Abstract Multi-homed devices such as smartphones, tablets and laptops are enabled with multiple heterogeneous interfaces available for transmission. Those interfaces can be utilized for simultaneous transmission of a single TCP flow using Multipath TCP (MPTCP). MPTCP is a protocol that is designed to increase end-to-end throughput and reliability of communications by splitting data through multiple parallel paths. Although delay in MPTCP enhanced significantly in the recent years, high number of data transmissions remains an issue. In this paper, we reduce MPTCP delay by reducing the number of transmissions using Opportunistic Routing (OR) technique. OR is a routing model used to increase the delivery rate and reliability of data transmission in wireless networks by using the broadcasting method. This enables each subflow data to be delivered by multiple relays. We adapted OR on a number of MPTCP protocols namely, traditional MPTCP, Multipath TCP Traffic Splitting Control (MPTCP-TSC) and Redundant MPTCP (ReMP TCP) in an Internet of Things (IoT) environment. The results show that OR-based MPTCP schemes outperform existing schemes. We further compared the OR-based MPTCP protocols in terms of startup delay and energy efficiency. We found that ReMP TCP is better than other schemes in all scenarios.