City Research Online

Abstract

In modern multiservice networks, with terminals equipped with multiple network interfaces, there is a clear trend to move from the dominating single path transport towards multipath. There are obvious benefits of the multipath service delivery – these include better resilience and improved throughput – and the standardization of multipath transport protocols MP-TCP, MP-DCCP, MP-QUIC and their usage in the 3GPP rel. 16 5G ATSSS (Access Traffic Splitting, Steering and Switching) multipath framework pave the way for broad implementation. While the field of traffic distribution algorithms for multipath transport is subject of extensive research, this paper addresses the challenge of cost-based optimization of scheduling in the multipath 3GPP ATSSS context. The paper demonstrates that there is a major conflict for the Video-on-Demand (VoD) traffic between the achievable QoE and the consumed multipath resources when a simple path prioritization algorithm – e.g. the Cheapest-Path-First (CPF) – is used to direct traffic. Using real network and testbed trials, this paper shows that for VoD in multipath up to 90% of the expensive path resources are consumed while QoE does not take any advantage from this, primarily because of the natural burstiness of the VoD traffic. The paper then proposes a novel service transparent and lightweight Cost-Optimized-Multipath (COM) traffic scheduling algorithm. Using extensive measurement of YouTube video streams and a MP-TCP implementation of the COM scheduler, this work demonstrates that – by finding the right balance between the QoE and the incurred costs – the new scheduler can provide better QoE compared to the single path transport, while eliminating the spurious resource consumption on the expensive path.

Publication Type:	Article
Additional Information:	This article is available under the Creative Commons CC-BY-NC license and permits non-commercial use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Publisher Keywords:	Multipath, Scheduler, Video on Demand, Cost optimization, MPTCP, ATSSS, Hybrid access
Subjects:	T Technology > TA Engineering (General). Civil engineering (General)
Departments:	School of Science & Technology School of Science & Technology > Engineering
SWORD Depositor:	Symplectic Administrator

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