TR2025-084

Modeling Multipath TCP Over Heterogeneous WiFi and 5G Networks


    •  Guo, J., Parsons, K., Nagai, Y., Sumi, T., Sakaguchi, N., Wang, P., Orlik, P.V., "Modeling Multipath TCP Over Heterogeneous WiFi and 5G Networks", IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC), June 2025.
      BibTeX TR2025-084 PDF
      • @inproceedings{Guo2025jun,
      • author = {Guo, Jianlin and Parsons, Kieran and Nagai, Yukimasa and Sumi, Takenori and Sakaguchi, Naotaka and Wang, Pu and Orlik, Philip V.},
      • title = {{Modeling Multipath TCP Over Heterogeneous WiFi and 5G Networks}},
      • booktitle = {IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC)},
      • year = 2025,
      • month = jun,
      • url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2025-084}
      • }
  • MERL Contacts:
  • Research Area:

    Communications

Abstract:

As the number of wireless devices supporting multiple communication interfaces increases, the connection redundancy is being considered for efficient bandwidth utilization and QoS improvement. Accordingly, network technologies must adapt to emerging multi-interface devices to improve network performance. Multipath TCP (MPTCP) is default multipath transport protocol desired for networks with multi-interface de- vices and has achieved success in computer networks. However, it has not been well studied for wireless networks, especially for carrier sense multiple access (CSMA) based wireless networks, which present great challenges to round trip time (RTT) computation and multipath scheduling. This paper introduces MPTCP techniques for heterogeneous WiFi and 5G networks. We first model a proposed 5-state congestion control algorithm and WiFi CSMA function. We then present an innovative RTT computation method and a novel loss-ware multipath scheduling mechanism. We evaluated the proposed MPTCP techniques under varying network configurations. Our MPTCP can significantly outperform conventional MPTCP.