ACCeSS: Adaptive QoS-aware Congestion Control for Multipath TCP

Abstract

Multipath TCP (MPTCP) enables multi-home devices to establish multiple paths for simultaneous data transmission. However, due to diverse Quality of Service (QoS) requirements in real network, existing multipath congestion control algorithms (CCAs) fail to fast adapt to dynamic traffic, which leads to performance degradation, especially in heterogeneous network environments. To tackle these problems, in this paper, we first observe the performance limitations of current multipath CCAs by conducting extensive experiments. Then we propose ACCeSS, an adaptive QoS-aware multipath congestion control framework, which is able to promptly adapt to network changes and QoS requirements with a novel control policy optimization phase. In order to adjust and stimulate improvement of the preferred performance metric, ACCeSS exploits Random Forest Regressing (RFR) method to perform QoS-specific utility function optimization. ACCeSS is implemented and compared with other multipath CCAs in Linux kernel. Performances of ACCeSS are evaluated in both emulated and real-world networks, which reveal that ACCeSS outperforms classic multipath CCAs and the state-of-the-art learning based multipath CCA with better adaptive capability of QoS.