Research, implementation, and improvement of MPTCP on mobile smart devices

摘要

As more and more mobile smart devices (MSDs) are equipped with multiple wireless network interfaces (e.g. WiFi, cellular, etc.), MultiPath TCP (MPTCP) can enable MSDs to send data over several interfaces or paths and can achieve better throughput and robust data transfers. MPTCP thus attracts an increasing interest from both academia and industry. This paper systematically studies MPTCP and clearly describes the relationship between each portions of MPTCP. Up to now, MPTCP has not been widely used in the mobile Internet, one of the reasons is that it is a challenge to research, implement and test MPTCP on the actual MSDs. To overcome the shortcoming of the existing researches on MPTCP being mainly limited to network simulators, a novel approach to port MPTCP to MSDs is proposed, which includes three main steps: first, run real mobile operating system (MOS) on VirtualBox; second, port MPTCP to MOS on VirtualBox and test; third, directly copy modified files in the second step to real MOS on MSD and test. By using this method, MPTCP V0.90 is successfully ported to a real smartphone running Android-7.1.1 for the first time. The validity of the method is proved by experiments. In addition, this paper improves the subpath establishment algorithm of MPTCP and applies the improved MPTCP to Mobile Ad Hoc Network (MANET) constructed by MSDs, the test result shows that our algorithm has better performance than the original MPTCP in achieving higher data throughput.