Intelligent data-striping: A predictive scheduling mechanism

New-age mobile devices are often equipped with multiple network interfaces, which can be exploited simultaneously by sharing a single traffic load over more than one available path. However, parallel data transfers introduce a serious risk to in-order data delivery for transport layer primitives. This is principally due to the difference in characteristics of one path from the other. It becomes crucial that the data be received in-order to avoid fast-retransmissions and head- of-line blocking problem at the transport layer. In this paper, we propose an intelligent transport layer scheduling mechanism which stripes data from one flow to multiple distinct paths and aggregates available resources ef- ficiently. Our mechanism first estimates the arrival times of each packet to be received at the receiver. It then schedules the outgoing packets in a way as to avoid data re-ordering at the receiver. Simulation results show that our mechanism efficiently reduces out-of-order data delivery at reception. Comparing our proposal with Concurrent Multipath Trans- fer (CMT), an SCTP based load-sharing technique; we show that it outperforms CMT in case of disparate path delays.