On the Energy Inefficiency of MPTCP for Mobile Computing

Abstract : Mobile devices have embraced Multi-Path TCP (MPTCP) for leveraging the path diversity. MPTCP is a double-edged sword since mobile phones are suffering excessively from short battery life span. In order to find energy efficiency of MPTCP, the signal quality and the transferred file size have been taken into account. We formulate the above problem as a Markovian Decision Process (MDP) for symmetric and asymmetric network traffic. Numerical and simulation results surprisingly show that MPTCP is not efficient in any selected scenarios and the proposed scheme can save 56 % of energy compared to the conventional MPTCP.