A Survey of Multipath TCP Scheduling Schemes: Open Challenges and Potential Enablers

Today, mobile devices like smartphones are supported with various wireless radio interfaces including cellular (3G/4G/LTE) and Wi-Fi (IEEE 802.11) [42]. The legacy devices can only communicate with only one interface. The Transmission Control Protocol, or TCP, has a limitation inability to change connection settings without breaking the connection. In this paper, we explain how multi-path TCP (MPTCP) protocol has been proposed to solve TCP single-interface limitation and provides a huge improvement on application performance by using multiple paths transparently (auto path changing). We discuss the last mile, which is the final networking segment that carried all network traffic. Indeed, the available bandwidth in last-mile link can effectively harm the network throughput as it limits the amount of transmitted data. We found that the quality of the last mile networks significantly determines the reliability and quality of the carrying network. We believe MPTCP can provide a convenient solution for the last mile problem. We provide a holistic view of the challenges and potential enablers in details.