Multipath mobile data offloading of deadline assurance with policy and charging control in cellular/WiFi networks

A promising L4-approach known as multipath TCP (MPTCP) has recently been standardized which allows a single transport connection to use multiple paths simultaneously over multiple interfaces. The use of MPTCP in offloading (i.e., multipath offloading) provides the potential to both maintain service connectivity and maximize the usage of the cellular resource. However, current Long Term Evolution (LTE) Policy and Charging Control (PCC) system lacks the ability to realize the coexistence of a cellular path (i.e., primary path) and an alternative path (i.e., secondary path) belonging to the same application session. As a result, it always determines the guaranteed bit-rate to the user under the assumption that the user has only a single LTE connection, and hence the usage efficiency of the cellular resources is seriously impaired. This paper proposes an enhanced PCC system with the consideration of using multipath offloading in cellular/WiFi networks. We propose a transport-based multipath offloading approach in which the LTE PCC system is rendered aware of alternative connection paths and allocates the available network resources accordingly. (C) 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.