Improving Connectivity in Multipath PLMN Setups: An MPTCP Scheduler Using Link Quality Indicators

Varying link qualities among multiple German PLMNs may lead to significant differences in QoS within a single area. MPTCP enables load balancing of multiple mobile links to compensate infrastructural differences between carriers. Yet, general purpose packet schedulers like minRTT lack important measures to properly estimate link quality in mobile scenarios. Thus, we propose a cross-layer MPTCP scheduler to improve general connectivity. Scheduling decisions are based on a self-constructed LQI that utilizes the physical layer RSSI measure to estimate link qualities. While our trace-based evaluation shows no improvements in RTTs compared to minRTT, packet loss is considerably reduced.