Abstract: Nowadays, as a variety of network interfaces are deployed in vehicles for a heterogeneous vehicular network, the diversity of interfaces leads to a noticeable difference in characteristics between transmission paths. When the vehicular heterogeneous network uses the multipath transmission control protocol (MPTCP) for transmission, it may causes blocking problem in the receive buffer due to the differences between paths, resulting in poor MPTCP transmission performance. For MPTCP receives buffer blocking problem, this paper proposes an MPTCP path scheduling optimization method based on path selection and receive buffer prediction (PSRBP). This method introduces a throughput prediction model, then introduces the similarity parameter between each path and the maximum throughput path. The similarity parameter is compared with a predetermined threshold to select a path that can be transmitted using MPTCP. After that, the proposed algorithm predicts the buffer congestion problem by calculating the number of out-of-ordered packets, then stops data transmission through the bad paths to improve the performance of MPTCP. Simulation results show that the algorithm can improve the overall system throughput and improve the network utilization.

Key words: vehicular heterogeneous network, multipath transmission control protocol (MPTCP), receive buffer blocking, multipath scheduling optimization