Freshness-Aware Age Optimization for Multipath TCP Over Software Defined Networks

Recently increasing real-time network applications have raised a new requirement for the future 6G network transmission, which desires the information-update packets arrive at the receiver as timely as possible. Multipath TCP (MPTCP) can be employed in the real-time update transmission system by making use of multiple paths so as to promote the information status update. However, current optimization solutions of MPTCP focus on traditional transmission performance such as throughput, delay, loss, jitter, etc. None of these works considers the freshness metric for MPTCP to satisfy the real-time demands. What’s more, most works about transmission model in Software Defined Network (SDN) are based on packet-level analysis without considering flow-level situation. In order to fill these gaps, this paper proposes a novel freshness-aware age optimization solution for MPTCP (FAMT) over SDN. FAMT introduces a new four-tuples to describe the transmission state in the SDN architecture. Then FAMT classifies the whole transmission process into two phases: connection establish phase and data transmission phase. Based on the two phases, FAMT evaluates and defines the age of information for different situations. In addition, FAMT designs an innovative age-assisted fluid model of MPTCP which can realize the four goals effectively. Simulation results show the performance of FAMT in terms of the different metrics compared with the existing solutions. © 2021 IEEE.