Adaptive Load Balancing Algorithm for multi-homing mobile nodes in local domain

In a wireless domain where a mobile user accesses heterogeneous wireless technologies with multiple interfaces, a multi-path scheduling algorithm can benefit mobile users´ experience by aggregating different network bandwidth together. However, existing literature actually shows that for TCP flows, it may not be the case. To better exploit multi-path scheduling for TCP connections, this paper presents a multi-path scheduling algorithm named Adaptive Load Balancing Algorithm (ALBAM) to split traffic across different network access for these multi-homed users. Unlike other multi-path scheduling algorithms, ALBAM takes full advantage of the infrastructure of wireless domain and it has the following advantages: (1) it does not involve any upgrade of protocol stack on user devices. (2) ALBAM does not introduce any protocol signaling cost into the bandwidth-constrained wireless networks. (3) ALBAM reduces the number of out-of-order packets. Thus, ALBAM improves the throughput of the TCP connections. To evaluate the performance of ALBAM, we conduct comparative simulations of ALBAM against a related technique, i.e. Opportunistic Multipath Scheduling. The results show that ALBAM can achieve good bandwidth aggregation and provide better performance to TCP connections in the wireless domain.