A huge amount of generated data is regularly exploding into the network by the users through smartphones, laptops, tablets, self-configured Internet-of-things (IoT) devices, and machine-to-machine (M2M) communication. In such a situation, satisfying critical quality-of-service (QoS) requirements (e.g., throughput, latency, bandwidth, and reliability) is a large challenge as a vast amount of data travels into the network. Nowadays, strict QoS requirements must be satisfied efficiently in many networked multimedia applications when intelligent multi-homed devices are used. Such devices support the concept of multi-homing. To be precise, they have multiple network interfaces that aim to connect and communicate concurrently with different networking technologies. Therefore, many multipath transport protocols are provided to multi-homed devices, which aim (1) to take advantage of several network paths at the transport layer (Layer-4) and (2) to meet the strict QoS requirements for providing low network latency, higher data rates, and increased reliability. To this end, this survey first presents the challenges/problems for supporting multipath transmission with possible solutions. Then, it reviews recent research efforts related to the concurrent multipath transmission (CMT) protocol and the multipath transmission control protocol (MPTCP). It reviews the latest research efforts by considering (1) how a multipath transport protocol operates (i.e., its functionality); (2) in what type of network; (3) what path characteristics it should consider; and (4) how it addresses various design challenges. Furthermore, it presents some lessons learned and discusses open research issues in multipath transport protocols.

Concurrent Multipath Transfer (CMT) uses multi-homing feature of Stream Control Transmission Protocol (SCTP) to transfer data concurrently over the multiple paths. CMT provides bandwidth aggregation, fault tolerance, and reliability in multipath data transfer. In multipath data transmission, each path has different delay and bandwidth. Therefore, destination receives unordered data which causes receiver buffer blocking and unwanted congestion window (cwnd) reduction. Both the problem degrades the CMT performance significantly. Thus, this paper proposes a new delay-based fast retransmission policy to adjust the transmission rate of each path according to path delay. Simulation results show that the proposed approach achieves better throughput, reduces the number of the timeout and improves the cwnd growth. The proposed approach improved throughput up to 16% in variable packet loss and 18% in variable network delay environment.

Stream Control Transmission Protocol (SCTP) exploits multiple network interfaces to provide multi-streaming and data chunk ordering in a stream. An extended feature of SCTP, i.e., Concurrent Multi-path Transfer (CMT), bids concurrent data transmission in a multi-path data transfer environment and guarantees bandwidth aggregation, load sharing, robustness, and reliability. In such an environment, the paths usually have distinct characteristics (i.e., delay, Packet Loss Rate (PLR), and bandwidth). Thus, data chunks are received out-of-ordered at the destination. As a result, CMT causes excessive receiver buffer blocking and unnecessary congestion window (cwnd) reductions. Also, during the selection of the retransmission destination path (to resend a lost data chunk), CMT does not take into account vital Quality of Service (QoS) parameters such as the PLR of a path under consideration. This paper introduces a new Delay-Based Concurrent Multi-path Transfer (DB-CMT) approach that transmits data on multiple paths according to their delay. In this scheme, we present a Delay-Based Data chunk Scheduling Policy (DB-DSP), a Retransmission Path Selection Policy (RTX-CL), and a new Delay-Based Fast Retransmission Policy (DB-FRP). The simulation results show that the DB-CMT’s RTX-CL policy performs better than the well-known RTX-CWND and RTX-LOSSRATE retransmission schemes. Also, the overall performance of DB-CMT witnesses improved throughput, fewer timeouts, and reduced File Transfer Time (FTT) performances.

With the exploding number of IoT devices generating vast data volumes, there is a growing risk of significant performance degradation without efficient congestion management. To tackle this challenge, efficient regulation and supervision are essential for managing congestion in IoT networks. This research work introduces a One-Way-Delay (OWD)-based congestion control (CC) method that estimates data transmission delays of the communication path and adjusts network traffic accordingly. The proposed method enhances IoT device performance by continuously monitoring OWD along the transmission path to identify and mitigate congestion. Comparative analysis with existing methods demonstrates that the proposed approach more effectively utilizes network resources, reduces congestion, and improves throughput while ensuring fairness and reliability within the IoT infrastructure. The experimental simulations show that the proposed OWD-based method outperforms well-established TCP variants such as BBR, TCP Cubic, HTCP, and New Reno, achieving average throughput improvements ranging from 4.1 % to 22.7 %. The proposed method also maintains fairness in mixed-traffic environments and effectively manages congestion in complex network topologies.