Improving Energy Efficiency of MPTCP for Mobile Devices

TL;DR

This paper presents an energy-efficient version of MPTCP, called eMPTCP, which reduces power consumption on mobile devices by up to 15% while maintaining performance, through a new energy consumption model and optimized protocol design.

Contribution

The paper introduces a novel energy consumption model for MPTCP on mobile devices and develops eMPTCP, an improved protocol that enhances energy efficiency without sacrificing robustness.

Findings

eMPTCP reduces power consumption by up to 15% compared to standard MPTCP.

eMPTCP maintains robustness and availability benefits of MPTCP.

eMPTCP outperforms TCP over WiFi in energy efficiency with minimal overhead.

Abstract

Multi-Path TCP (MPTCP) is a new transport protocol that enables systems to exploit available paths through multiple network interfaces. MPTCP is particularly useful for mobile devices, which usually have multiple wireless interfaces. However, these devices have limited power capacity and thus judicious use of these interfaces is required. In this work, we develop a model for MPTCP energy consumption derived from experimental measurements using MPTCP on a mobile device with both cellular and WiFi interfaces. Using our energy model, we identify an operating region where there is scope to improve power efficiency compared to both standard TCP and MPTCP. We design and implement an improved energy-efficient MPTCP, called eMPTCP. We evaluate eMPTCP on a mobile device across several scenarios, including varying bandwidth, background traffic, and user mobility. Our results show that eMPTCP can reduce the power consumption by up to 15% compared with MPTCP, while preserving the availability and robustness benefits of MPTCP. Furthermore, we show that when compared with TCP over WiFi, which is more energy efficient than TCP over LTE, eMPTCP obtains significantly better performance with relatively little additional energy overhead.