Multipath TCP in Vehicular to Infrastructure Communications

Abstract

liminary experiments investigating the use of Multipath TCP (MPTCP) to augment cellular 3G connections with roadside infrastructure based on emulated WAVE/DSRC transceivers. MPTCP is an extension to TCP that allows a multi-homed host to utilise multiple interfaces on a single TCP socket. The IEEE WAVE/DSRC stack defines standards for wireless vehicular communications. Exper-iments are performed on a physical testbed using the Linux MPTCP implementation. We first characterise the performance of MPTCP using a mix of wireless links. We then simulate MPTCP mobility using WiFi and 3G. Finally we conduct a small-scale, vehicle-based field test using 3G and a DSRC transceiver adapted from 802.11a hardware. We find that in cases of high path-diversity MPTCP can perform worse than standard TCP. When used in mobile scenarios (both simulated and in field trials), MPTCP is found to provide some benefit to existing 3G connections by detecting and then utilising roadside access points. Index Terms—MPTCP, V2I, WAVE, DSRC, 802.11p, experiments, testbed I.