Performance of Multipath TCP Schedulers in Concurrent Use of 5G and 4G Networks
Imtiaz Mahmud, You-Ze Cho · 2022 27th Asia Pacific Conference on Communications (APCC) · 2022
Currently, mobile operators are deploying the 5G cellular network worldwide. Due to limited coverage and small-scale deployment, handoffs often occur from 5G to 4G and vice versa. These handoffs often lead to significant delays caused by retransmissions. Instead of using either 5G or 4G connection, simultaneous use of 5G and 4G, i.e., multipath connection, is anticipated to yield better performance. In this paper, we empirically study the performance of multipath TCP schedulers in such a scenario. Through NS3-DCE simulation experiments, we investigated the throughput, received SINR, and flow completion time for considered schedulers using the default Linux setup. We found that the BLEST scheduler shows the best performance because of its fast awareness and adaptability towards the head of line blocking.