Performance enhancement of multipath TCP with cooperative relays in a collaborative community

Pooling mobile nodes in vicinity as a collaborative community offers an opportunity for multi-homed mobile nodes to enable multipath transmission even when there is no multiple access coverage. However, packet collisions exist within the collaborative community when a contention-based channel access such as IEEE 802.11 is applied. As a result, the overall multipath performance may degrade if a regular multipath transmission protocol is used in a collaborative community consisting of multiple relays. In this paper, we extend the multipath transport control protocol (MPTCP) at the receiver side for a collaborative community. Our proposed extensions, referred to as Co-MPTCP, take advantage of fast ACKs and receive buffer sharing at relays. A collaborative community consisting of a root node and multiple relays presents as a virtual multi-homed receiver to the sender. Extensive simulations are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of our extensions in terms of throughput, goodput, and receive buffer relief.