CMT-CQA: Cross-layer QoS-aware adaptive concurrent multipath data transfer in heterogeneous networks

Stream control transport protocol (SCTP)-based concurrent multipath transfer (CMT) can help multi-homed devices to increase their throughput by making use of parallel transmissions over multiple paths and bandwidth aggregation. However, if CMT cannot identify wireless error, it cannot really achieve the desired performance. Furthermore, if CMT only utilizes all available paths for data delivery, it will undoubtedly degrade application-level performance since the asymmetric paths may involve large quality differences. This paper proposes a novel cross-layer quality-of-service (QoS)-aware adaptive CMT (CMT-CQA) with the following aims: (i) to provide an adaptive ‘CMT-to-partial CMT’ adjustment strategy for efficient bandwidth aggregation by jointly considering transport layer QoS, MAC layer QoS, and path history information; (ii) to address an enhanced congestion window (cwnd) fast recovery mechanism to reduce bursty transmission in multi-homed wireless network environments where fail-over occurs frequently; and (iii) to introduce a proper multimedia transmission behavior to improve users' quality of experience (QoE) for multimedia streaming service. Simulation results show that CMT-CQA outperforms the existing CMT solutions in terms of performance and QoS. © 2014 Institute of Electrical Engineers of Japan. Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.