Multipath Binomial Congestion Control Algorithms

Nowadays portable devices with multiple wireless interfaces and using multimedia services are becoming more popular on the Internet. This paper describes a family of multipath binomial congestion control algorithms for audio/video streaming, where a low variant of transmission rate is important. We extend the fluid model of binomial algorithms for single-path transmission to support the concurrent transmission of packets across multiple paths. We focus on the extension of two particular algorithms, SQRT and IIAD, for multiple paths, called MPSQRT and MPIIAD, respectively. Additionally, we apply the design technique (using the multipath fluid model) for multipath TCP (MPTCP) into the extension of SQRT and IIAD, called fbMPSQRT and fbMPIIAD, respectively. Both two approaches ensure that multipath binomial congestion control algorithms achieve load-balancing, throughput improvement, and fairness to single-path binomial algorithms at shared bottlenecks. Through the simulations and comparison with the uncoordinated protocols MPSQRT/MPIIAD, fbMPSQRT/fbMPIIAD and MPTCP, we find that our extended multipath transport protocols can preserve lower latency and transmission rate variance than MPTCP, fairly share with single-path SQRT/IIAD, MPTCP and TCP, and also can achieve throughput improvements and load-balancing equivalent to those of MPTCP under various scenarios and network conditions. key words: multipath binomial congestion control, multimedia streaming, fairness, load-balancing