HMTP: Multipath transport protocol for multihoming wireless erasure networks

Abstract

This paper proposes a fountain‐code‐based multipath transport protocol, called heterogeneous multipath transport protocol (HMTP), and evaluates its performance. HMTP improves the throughput performance and path utilisation of multihoming wireless erasure networks. It solves the receive buffer blocking problem and eliminates the need for retransmissions and in‐order packet delivery, both of which severely degrade the performance of existing multipath transport protocols in multihoming networks. The encoding and decoding algorithms of HMTP are based on efficient and computationally inexpensive coding algorithms such as LT codes. To minimise the fountain encoding/decoding overhead, complexity and computational cost while ensuring the desired decoding performance, the appropriate values of the parameters of the LT codes are determined. We implement and extensively evaluate the performance of HMTP using both NS‐2 simulator and an 802.11 wireless local area network laboratory test bed. Our simulations and experimental results show that HMTP significantly outperforms the concurrent multipath transfer stream control transmission protocol, especially in multihoming 802.11 wireless local area networks. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

AeroMTP: A fountain code-based multipath transport protocol for airborne networks

“…However, the multipath transport protocols in Ref. [13][14][15] are not suitable for ANs in the harsh communication environment. On the one hand, these protocols use TCP-like window-based congestion control for each path.…”

“…17 The window-based congestion control used in Ref. [13][14][15] can also not counter some of the challenges posed by ANs such as frequent blackouts and bandwidth asymmetry. On the other hand, the packet allocation schemes used in these protocols are to deliver the encoded packets in a short time by sending them via ''better'' paths, which cannot guarantee that a block can be successfully delivered in a minimal amount of time over multiple volatile paths in ANs.…”

“…According to the integer programming Eq. (14), the rate-base scheme can find approximately optimum solution to minimize block delivery delay, while the simple scheme intuitively selects the best path to send the packets. Consequently, the rate-based scheme can work better than the simple scheme in heterogeneous multihoming networks.…”

“…Multi-path loss-tolerant (MPLOT) transport protocol 13 uses a fixed rate coding scheme, which does not have good performance when the path quality decreases sharply. As a rateless code, fountain code 16 is used for packet-level FEC in heterogeneous multipath transport protocol (HMTP) 14 and fountain code based multipath TCP (FMTCP), 15 which can work better than the fixed rate FEC code over lossy networks. However, the multipath transport protocols in Ref.…”

“…In order to improve the performance over lossy networks, packet-level FEC code is introduced into multipath protocols. [13][14][15] In these protocols, application layer data is divided into blocks which are then converted to a series of encoded packets. As long as the receiver successfully receives a certain number of encoded packets for a block, this block can be recovered and transmitted to the application layer.…”