DaMPS: A Deadline-Aware Multipath Packet Scheduler for Mobile Applications

Many popular mobile applications, such as online gaming and live video streaming, impose strict deadlines on packets arrivals. Modern mobile devices are equipped with both Wi-Fi and cellular interfaces, facilitating multipath transmissions. However, many packet schedulers overlook the deadline requirements associated with multipath transmissions, which is crucial for enhancing the overall user experience of mobile applications. In this paper, we propose a Deadline-aware Multipath Packet Scheduler, DaMPS, designed specifically to prioritize packet delivery before their deadlines in mobile networks. DaMPS dynamically adjusts the sending order and path allocation for packets while adhering to deadline requirements, thus enhancing its performance in dynamic network environments. We implement DaMPS in MPQUIC and evaluate its effectiveness across various network conditions using Mininet. Our extensive experiment results demonstrate that DaMPS improves the deadline adherence performance by 27% ~149 % with comparable high throughput and low latency compared with other schedulers.