Leveraging Coupled BBR and Adaptive Packet Scheduling to Boost MPTCP

TL;DR

This paper introduces Coupled BBR and an adaptive packet scheduler to enhance MPTCP performance, achieving higher throughput, better robustness, and reduced out-of-order packets in dynamic and lossy networks.

Contribution

It proposes Coupled BBR for improved congestion control in MPTCP and an AR&P scheduler for better adaptability and in-order delivery in challenging network conditions.

Findings

Higher throughput in testbed and real networks

Improved robustness in lossy scenarios

Reduced out-of-order packets in harsh conditions

Abstract

Quite a few algorithms have been proposed to optimize the transmission performance of Multipath TCP (MPTCP). However, existing MPTCP protocols are still far from satisfactory in lossy and ever-changing networks because of their loss-based congestion control and the difficulty of managing multiple subflows. Recently, a congestion-based congestion control, BBR, is proposed to promote TCP transmission performance through better use of bandwidth. Due to the superior performance of BBR, we try to boost MPTCP with it. For this propose, coupled congestion control should be redesigned for MPTCP, and a functional scheduler able to effectively make use of the characteristics of BBR must also be developed for better performance. In this paper, we first propose Coupled BBR as a coupled congestion control algorithm for MPTCP to achieve high throughput and stable sending rate in lossy network scenarios with guaranteed fairness with TCP BBR flows and balanced congestion. Then, to further improve the performance, we propose an Adaptively Redundant and Packet-by-Packet (AR\&P) scheduler, which includes two scheduling methods to improve adaptability in highly dynamic network scenarios and keep in-order packet delivery in asymmetric networks. Based on Linux kernel implementation and experiments in both testbed and real network scenarios, we show that the proposed scheme not only provides higher throughput, but also improves robustness and reduces out-of-order packets in some harsh circumstances.