The design of mobile concurrent multipath transfer in multihomed wireless mobile networks

As more and more devices are equipped with multiple network interfaces, the multihomed technology is becoming an important technology that can provide more reliable connection against the network failure and higher data transmission rate. Concurrent Multipath Transfer (CMT), which is based on SCTP, is devised for multihomed networks. CMT can transmit data over all paths to maximize the data transmission speed. One of the main concerns of CMT is the receiver buffer blocking issue, especially in multihomed wireless mobile networks. Receiver buffer blocking is mainly caused by lost data. In this paper, we propose mobile CMT (mCMT) over wireless networks to deal with the receiver buffer blocking caused by error loss and handoff loss. mCMT has the features of (i) path-oriented multistreaming, (ii) MIH-assisted handoff mechanism, in which MIH denotes Media Independent Handover and (iii) association resume. Path-oriented multistreaming can reduce the receiver buffer blocking caused by error loss. MIH-assisted a handoff can reduce the amount of packet loss during a handoff, which may lead to receiver buffer blocking. Moreover, mCMT introduces the concept of association resume to recover the disconnected association. Simulation results show that mCMT can reduce the effect of the receiver buffer blocking effectively for devices that have smaller buffer size.