An MPTCP-Based Transmission Scheme for Improving the Control Stability of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

Self Cite

In the last ten years, supported by the advances in technologies for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), UAVs have developed rapidly and are utilized for a wide range of applications. To operate UAVs safely, by exchanging control packets continuously, operators should be able to monitor UAVs in real-time and deal with any problems immediately. However, due to any networking problems or unstable wireless communications, control packets can be lost or transmissions can be delayed, which causes the unstable drone control. To overcome this limitation, in this paper, we propose MuTran for enabling reliable UAV control. MuTran considers the packet type and duplicates only control packets, not data packets. After that, MuTran transmits the original and duplicate packets through multiple protocols and paths to improve the reliability of control packet transmissions. We designed MuTran and conducted a lot of theoretical analyses to demonstrate the validity of MuTran and analyze it from various aspects. We implemented MuTran on real devices and evaluated MuTran using the devices. We conducted experiments to verify the limitations of the existing systems and demonstrate that control packets can be transmitted more stably by using MuTran. Through the analysis and experimental results, we confirmed that MuTran reduces the control packet transfer delay, which improves the reliability and stability of controlling UAVs.

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Performance Evaluationmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Enabling Reliable UAV Control by Utilizing Multiple Protocols and Paths for Transmitting Duplicated Control Packets

Lee

2021

Self Cite

“…Devices with multiple communication interfaces, such as 5G/4G and WiFi, are widely used. Although it is anticipated that such devices will increase the speed of the Internet by the simultaneous use of multiple interfaces, in practice, intermittently, they are significantly slower than devices using a single communication module [ 1 , 2 , 3 ]. Lack of a suitable transport layer protocol is one of the key reasons why such devices have not achieved anticipated results.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

BA-MPCUBIC: Bottleneck-Aware Multipath CUBIC for Multipath-TCP

Mahmud

Lubna

Kim

et al. 2021

The Congestion Control Algorithm (CCA) in the Multipath Transmission Control Protocol (MPTCP) is fundamental to controlling the flow of data through multiple subflows (SF) simultaneously. The MPTCP CCA has two design goals: first, always ensure better throughput than single path TCP (SPTCP) flows, and second, collectively, MPTCP SFs going through a shared bottleneck (SB) should occupy bandwidth fairly, i.e., close to the bandwidth occupied by an SPTCP flow. Although several MPTCP CCAs exist, they primarily focus on specific scenarios and could not satisfy the design goals in diverse and dynamic scenarios. Recently, CUBIC has become a widely used CCA for SPTCP for its better compatibility with high-speed internet. CUBIC’s effective implementation in the MPTCP is expected to provide improved throughput and fairer behavior, thus satisfying the design goals. However, although the current multipath CUBIC (MPCUBIC) implementation ensures better fairness, it fails to ensure better throughput. We believe the application of same rule for SFs going through an SB and non-shared bottleneck (NSB) makes it difficult for MPCUBIC to adapt to diverse and dynamically changing network scenarios, thus resulting in poor throughput. Therefore, we present an improved version of MPCUBIC, namely bottleneck-aware MPCUBIC (BA-MPCUBIC), to resolve the throughput issue. First, we deploy an innovative bottleneck detection method that successfully differentiates between an SB and NSB based on round-trip-time, enhanced congestion notification, and packet loss. Then, we implement SPTCP CUBIC and MPCUBIC as the CCAs for SFs going through NSBs and SBs, respectively. Extensive emulation experiments demonstrate that the BA-MPCUBIC successfully detects SBs and NSBs with the highest detection accuracy and the lowest detection time compared with other approaches. Moreover, BA-MPCUBIC successfully satisfies the MPTCP design goals in the considered diverse and dynamic scenarios by ensuring both better throughput and fairness.

“…Furthermore, given the high volume of short-lived traffic, network conditions change continuously. Several high-end research works have been going on to address this issue [29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36]. We firmly believe that considering current network conditions can play a vital role in ensuring high throughput and reducing delay over the Internet.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

D-OLIA: A Hybrid MPTCP Congestion Control Algorithm with Network Delay Estimation

Lubna

Mahmud

Kim

et al. 2021

With the recent evolution of mobile technology, modern devices equipped with multiple communication interfaces have become popular. The multipath transmission control protocol (MPTCP) has evolved to facilitate multiple communication interfaces through a single TCP connection for faster Internet access. MPTCP congestion control algorithms (MPTCP-CCAs) control data flow by fulfilling three design goals, i.e., ensuring improvement over single-path flows, ensuring fairness, and balancing congestion. Current MPTCP-CCAs cannot fulfill these design goals. For example, the opportunistic-linked increase algorithm (OLIA), a well-known MPTCP-CCA in load balancing, often results in low throughput because it cannot properly utilize the underlying network. In addition, the current Internet has a rapidly changing characteristic due to a large amount of short-lived traffic, making it difficult for MPTCP-CCAs to cope. An awareness of prevailing network delay conditions might help MPTCP-CCAs to utilize the network capacity fully. Therefore, we propose dynamic OLIA (D-OLIA), a hybrid MPTCP-CCA that enhances the performance of OLIA by integrating an awareness of the current network delay condition for deciding the congestion window (CWND) decrease factor. We estimate the current network delay condition, i.e., less-congested or congested, by observing the changes in the round-trip-time (RTT). Based on the estimated network delay condition, we decide the CWND decrease factor in real-time for reducing the CWND during packet loss events. We implemented D-OLIA in the Linux kernel and experimented using the Mininet emulator. The emulation results demonstrate that D-OLIA successfully estimates current network delay conditions and results in approximately a 20% increased throughput compared to the original OLIA. Compared to certain MPTCP-CCAs, it also yields a highly improved performance in terms of throughput, RTT, packet retransmissions, and fairness among the MPTCP sub-flows.