Reliable Multipath Transfer Scheduling Algorithm Research and Prototype Implementation

End-to-end data transfer has long been a fundamental service of Internet. With the trend of multi-interface communication terminals and redundant paths between them both in cellular networks and in the Internet, efficient protocols of multipath transfer are needed to gain the benefits of multi-interfaces. In this paper, we propose SAR-RMTP, a Self-adapted Rescheduling Reliable Multipath Transfer Protocol for end-to-end file transfer, which can adaptively reschedule data to different paths according to the current average bandwidth to achieve nearly the same transferring finish time between different paths, and thus results in effective use of overall bandwidth. We implement the prototype of SAR-RMTP in Linux and compare its performance with existing scheduling algorithms in experimental environment. The results show that SARRMTP can notably decrease the difference of transfer finish time of different paths and thus shorten the overall file transfer time and increase the overall bandwidth. The results also show that compared with other scheduling algorithms SAR-RMTP can achieve much better performance when bandwidth changes more dramatically.