Estimating the Effects of Multipath Selection on Concurrent Multipath Transfer

Multi-mode device which combines multiple access technologies into a device will offer more cost-effective solution than a sole access implementation. Its concurrent multipath transfer (CMT) technology can transmit media flows over multiple end-to-end paths simultaneously, which is essential to select at least two paths from all available paths. At real networks, different paths are likely to overlap each other and even share bottleneck, which can weaken the path diversity gained through CMT. Spurred by this observation, it is necessary to select multiple independent paths as much as possible to avoid underlying shared bottleneck between topologically joint paths. Recent research in this context has shown that different paths with shared bottleneck can weaken the path diversity gained through CMT. In our earlier work, a grouping-based multipath selection (GMS) mechanism is introduced and developed. However, how to estimating the selection is still to be resolved. In this paper, we firstly introduce a Selection Correctness Index (SCI) to evaluate the correctness of selection results in actual CMT experiment. Therefore, this metric is helpful to discuss and validate the accuracy of the output paths. From extensive experiments with a realized prototype, the proposed scheme provides better evaluation tool and criterion in various network conditions.