Performance analysis and optimization of multipath TCP

¹TCP is a popular transport layer protocol. The performance of TCP is known to be unsatisfactory in wireless network, due to high bit error rates or drop outs. Employing error correction at the transport layer can alleviate the problem to some extent. We make three contributions in this paper. First, we optimize the efficiency of repetitive codes. In particular, we propose a good estimate on throughput and obtain a simple formula to estimate the optimal number of paths that maximizes efficiency. Second, we analyze the optimization of efficiency when using Reed-Solomon Erasure Code with TCP. We show that the improvement is dramatic for stable channels but not as significant for noisy channels. Third, we find that the bottleneck on the efficiency for multipath TCP transmission with coding is the protocol TCP. Therefore, to drastically increase efficiency in wireless network, we should use another protocol instead of TCP.