DPS: A Delay-Programmable Scheduler for the Packet Out-of-Order Mitigation in Heterogeneous Networks
Lu Jin, Wei Quan, Gang Liu, Deyun Gao, Chuan Heng Foh, Qianpeng Wang · 2020
Heterogeneous networks offer multipath transmission through various protocol stacks which allow multiplexing of packet transmission for high throughput and enhanced security as multipath prevents sniffing of full information from a single point. However, multipath transmission often lead to arriving packet out-of-order issue due to the different characteristics of various paths. The immediate consequence is the lengthening of transmission delay due to buffering at receivers. This paper proposes a lightweight and novel Delay-Programmable Scheduling (DPS) mechanism to mitigate the out-of-order problem, while maintaining the security feature of multipath. Specifically, a virtual link loop is equipped to buffer the out-of-order packets with fixed delay using the powerful Linux TC method. DPS then adaptively controls the number of packets transmitted in the virtual link loop. Additionally, a data transport model receives the DPS control decisions and translates them into scheduling parameters which effectively schedules the out-of-order packets in the virtual link loop to achieve a controllable delay for the packets. DPS also simultaneously deals with multipath. Compared with state-of-the-art mechanisms, the experimental results show that DPS can reduce the number of out-of-order packets by 57.4%, and increase the average throughput by 141.2%.