Multipath TCP Prioritized For Ad hoc Networks

Abstract

In 2019, most of the smartphones are equipped with multiple interfaces such as WiFi, Bluetooth and Cellular. However, only one such interface can be used with standard TCP connection. As a solution for this, channel bonding can be used. In a situation where two interfaces connected to two ISPs, channel bonding is not possible. To overcome this problem and to utilize the use of multiple interfaces simultaneously, multipath TCP can be used. In 2019 the number of mobile users stood at 4.68 billion. With this substantial number of mobile devices, there is an opportunity to create a local ad hoc network between these devices. When considering the utilization of multipath TCP and ad hoc network, there is an opportunity to develop a cost-efficient way to route data through mobile ad hoc network. Ad hoc networking can be used anytime, anywhere with limited or no communication infrastructure. Ad hoc network structure can be used in many real world scenarios as well. With multipath TCP and relatively cost-efficient paths there is an opportunity to have cost effective routing of data as well as a reliable connection. In this research our goal was to implement a solution to prioritize the subflow that uses the ah hoc network. In this research we divided the problem into three sub problems. Which are assigning a weight to the subflow to be selected more often, pass a user hint to the kernel level to select the ad hoc network interface and improve the recovery speed by changing the retransmission rate. In this research we managed to provide solutions for all sub problems. There are other researches that prioritize an interface over the others. One similar research introduced a solution named Delphi, a transport-layer module to choose witch interface to use. One major drawback with this method is not utilizing other interfaces capabilities. We demonstrate that by utilizing multipath TCP this limitation can be bypassed.