A Fluid Model Study of Multipath Communication in a Hybrid Network for a Moving Convoy

Mobile communication platforms of ships, aircrafts, ground vehicles, or individual agents of both military and public services often operate in highly dynamic conditions with constantly changing infrastructure and access to communication resources. Efficient techniques for rapid and yet stable communication of such fleets with their control centres and between cooperating vehicles within the fleet is a challenging but important area of study with the potential to facilitate the analysis and design of efficient and robust communication systems. Multi-path extensions of data transmission protocols aim to take advantage of path diversity to achieve efficient bandwidth allocation while maintaining stability. Such multi-path resourcepooling extensions of routing and congestion control intrinsically implement decentralisation with implicit resource sharing. In this paper, we build on the recent theoretical work on fluid model approximations of multi-path TCP and study their application to the scenarios in which a convoy with two communication nodes (representing a convoy’s head and tail) establishes channels with a set of radio/WiFi towers and a satellite relaying information to a remote destination; these channels have time-varying capacities which depend on the position and dynamics of the convoy. The paper demonstrates how path diversity can be implicitly utilised to spread flow across available paths under such scenarios.