Reinforcing Edge Computing with Multipath TCP Enabled Mobile Device Clouds

TL;DR

This paper introduces a Multi-Path TCP enabled mobile device cloud to enhance throughput and robustness in mobile edge computing, addressing congestion issues through a novel user space congestion handler.

Contribution

It proposes a new MPTCP-enabled mobile device cloud architecture with a congestion management agent, improving bandwidth utilization and connectivity robustness.

Findings

Higher throughput with MPTCP in mobile clouds

Effective congestion management via user space agent

Preliminary analysis shows system benefits

Abstract

In recent years, enormous growth has been witnessed in the computational and storage capabilities of mobile devices. However, much of this computational and storage capabilities are not always fully used. On the other hand, popularity of mobile edge computing which aims to replace the traditional centralized powerful cloud with multiple edge servers is rapidly growing. In particular, applications having strict latency requirements can be best served by the mobile edge clouds due to a reduced round-trip delay. In this paper we propose a Multi-Path TCP (MPTCP) enabled mobile device cloud (MDC) as a replacement to the existing TCP based or D2D device cloud techniques, as it effectively makes use of the available bandwidth by providing much higher throughput as well as ensures robust wireless connectivity. We investigate the congestion in mobile-device cloud formation resulting mainly due to the message passing for service providing nodes at the time of discovery, service continuity and formation of cloud composition. We propose a user space agent called congestion handler that enable offloading of packets from one sub-flow to the other under link quality constraints. Further, we discuss the benefits of this design and perform preliminary analysis of the system.