Impact of Energy Consumption on Multipath TCP Enabled Mobiles

Multiple accesses are common for most mobile devices today. This technological advance opens up a new design space for improving the communication performance of mobile devices. Multipath TCP is a TCP extension that enables using multiple network paths between two end systems for a single TCP connection, increasing performance and reliability. Meanwhile, when operating multiple active interfaces, multipath-TCP also consumes substantial more power and drains out bettery faster than using one interface. Thus, enabling Multipath TCP on mobile devices brings in new challenges. In this paper, we theoretically analyze the underlying design choices given by the Multipath TCP. In particular, we theoretically formulate the relation between performance (throughput) and energy consumption for Multipath TCP. We find that sometime the throughput and energy consumption can be concurrently improved.