TMPTCP: Tailless Multi-path TCP

Multi-path TCP (MPTCP) has been introduced to take advantage of the path diversity for network performance enhancement. To date, the energy efficiency aspect of MPTCP not been studied extensively, and the effect of tail energy, which plays a significant role in energy waste, has been neglected. This paper proposes Tailless Multi-path TCP (TMPTCP) to improve the energy efficiency of MPTCP by tail energy minimization; therefore, network traffic behaviors and transceiver characteristics have been taken into account. The problem is formulated as a Markov decision process (MDP), endeavoring to optimize jointly energy efficiency and delay by selecting the best policy. Offline experiments show that the proposed scheme reduces energy consumption by up to 46% for uploading and 34% for downloading. Moreover, it is revealed that on average TMPTCP saves 30%-45% energy, compared to MPTCP, but at the expense of more delay.