On Energy-Efficient Congestion Control for Multipath TCP

Multipath TCP (MPTCP) enables transmission via multiple routes for an end-to-end connection to improve resource usage of regular TCP. Due to the increasing concern in green computing, there has been significant interest in designing energy-efficient multipath transport. For existing MPTCP congestion control algorithms, the research community still lacks a comprehensive understanding of which components in such an algorithm play the fundamental role in energy efficiency, how various algorithms compare against each other from energy-consuming perspective, or whether there exist potentially better solutions for energy saving. In this paper, we take a first step to answer these questions. Based on the MPTCP Linux kernel experiments, we first summarize that the energy consumption is related to three aspects: average throughput, path delay and different network scenarios. In order to bridge congestion control to the three aspects, we analyze the existing algorithms and capture the essential parameters of multipath congestion control model related to MPTCP's energy-efficiency. Then we design a window increase factor to shift traffic to low-delay energy-efficient paths. We further extend this design by using an energy-aware compensative parameter to fit the general hierarchical Internet topology. We evaluate the performance of existing multipath congestion control algorithms and our proposed algorithm in different network scenarios. The results successfully validate the improved energy efficiency of our design.