DEFT: Multipath TCP for High Speed Low Latency Communications in 5G Networks

Multipath TCP (MPTCP) is a promising solution that can provide high end-to-end throughput in fifth generation (5G) mobile networks. Many next-generation applications will require high throughput and low latency simultaneously, but the current MPTCP congestion control algorithms cannot reliably satisfy this requirement. In this paper, a novel MPTCP congestion control scheme named delay-equalized FAST (DEFT) is proposed to achieve high throughput and low end-to-end (E2E) delay in 5G networks. First, in order to achieve high throughput, DEFT includes a novel window control algorithm that shows fast responsiveness when the state of the millimeter-wave (mmWave) link changes from line-of-sight (LOS) to non-LOS (NLOS) and vice versa. Second, in order to achieve low E2E delay, DEFT includes a delay-equalizing algorithm which minimizes additional reordering delay in the receive buffer. The performance of DEFT was evaluated based on ns-3 simulation and was compared with wVegas, Balia, and delay-adapted LIA. Simulation results show that DEFT can provide a significant goodput gain and application-level E2E delay reduction for the range of interest.