Can Multipath TCP save energy? A measuring and modeling study of MPTCP energy consumption

Abstract

Mobile data consumption has seen a considerable rise and is predicted to further increase. This is mainly caused by mobile video consumption. A promising solution is offloading cellular traffic to WiFi. Here, Multipath TCP (MPTCP) enables a seamless user experience for handover and load balancing. However, its influence on the energy consumption of smartphones is not yet well analyzed. To this end, this paper determines the energy cost of using MPTCP for mobile constant bit rate streaming on two Nexus devices and compares it to the power consumption using single interface TCP streaming. From this, recommendations for an optimal assignment of sub-streams to interfaces are derived. The measurements indicate that using MPTCP on certain smartphones causes a 20% lower energy expense compared to the cost of both interfaces individually. However, MPTCP using multiple interfaces should only be used if the requested data rate cannot be supported by a single interface.