Energy Efficient Multipath TCP for Mobile Devices

Most mobile devices today come with multiple access interfaces, e.g., 4G and WiFi. Multipath TCP (MP-TCP) can greatly improve network performance by exploiting the connection diversity of multiple access interfaces, at the expense of higher energy consumption. In this paper, we design MP-TCP algorithms for mobile devices by jointly considering the performance and energy consumption. We consider two main types of mobile applications: realtime applications that have a fixed duration and file transfer applications that have a fixed data size. For each type of applications, we propose a two-timescale algorithm with theoretical guarantee on the performance. We present simulation results that show that our algorithms can reduce energy consumption by up to 22% without sacrificing throughput compared to a baseline MP-TCP algorithm.