Performance Insights on Using Multipath TCP for Wireless Multihomed IoT Gateways

This paper addresses the throughput performance of wireless multihomed IoT gateways when they use the multipath TCP (MPTCP) protocol to transfer their traffic to the corresponding management entities. The paper introduces a testbed that can measure the MPTCP throughput of multihomed IoT gateways in a practical setup that uses a real LTE network in overlapped coverage with a real WiFi network. The paper also investigates the behavior of MPTCP when an AP and an eNodeB cover a large number of multihomed IoT gateways by using an ns-3 setup that is validated by the testbed. Our preliminary findings reveal that MPTCP does not efficiently distribute the gateway traffic over the two wireless interfaces by utilizing one interface much more than the other in a pattern that depends on the number of gateways. Also, using MPTCP results in a fairness issue observed as a wide variation of the throughput among different IoT gateways compared with using standard single-path TCP.