TA2LS: A Traffic-Aware Multipath Scheduler for Cost-Effective QoE in Dynamic HetNets

Multipath transmission is a critical enabling technology to enhance QoE for edge users. The packet scheduler plays an irreplaceable role in overcoming heterogeneity and dynamicity in multipath transmission. However, current schedulers depend on an inaccurate delay estimation and lack systematic traffic intensity awareness, performing poorly in wireless heterogeneous networks (HetNets). In this paper, we propose a novel traffic-aware two-level packet scheduler (TA2LS) to address the problem and improve aggregated bandwidth while trading off delay. In particular, we design a multipath transmission state machine (MTSM) to perceive link traffic intensity. MTSM replaces network prediction algorithms by identifying the contribution of each link in multipath transmission in a cost-effective way. Further, we propose a scheduling mechanism based on a two-level optimal-path evaluation method (2LOSM) to adjust the packet scheduling policy adaptively. 2LOSM increases the priority of links with low traffic intensity during scheduling, improving aggregated bandwidth performance and reducing end-to-end delay. We have built a real-world 4G/5G/WiFi testbed and deployed 47 dynamic scenarios to evaluate TA2LS and other five schedulers. In 4G/5G/WiFi scenarios, TA2LS improves aggregated bandwidth by 10.32%–48.27% compared to the second-best scheduler and reduces end-to-end delay by 5.04%–39.98% under the premise of fewer or equivalent overheads.