Optimal file splitting for wireless networks with concurrent access

Abstract. The fundamental limits on channel capacity form a barrier to the sustained growth on the use of wireless networks. To cope with this, multi-path communication solutions provide a promising means to improve reliability and boost Quality of Service (QoS) in areas that are covered by a multitude of wireless access networks. Today, little is known about how to effectively exploit this potential. Motivated by this, we consider N parallel communication networks, each of which is modeled as a processor sharing (PS) queue that handles two types of traffic: foreground and background. We consider a foreground traffic stream of files, each of which is split into N fragments according to a fixed splitting rule (α1, . . . , αN ), where P αi = 1 and αi ≥ 0 is the fraction of the file that is directed to network i. Upon completion of transmission of all fragments of a file, it is re-assembled at the receiving end. The background streams use dedicated networks without being split. We study the sojourn time tail behavior of the foreground traffic. For the case of light foreground traffic and regularly varying foreground filesize distributions, we obtain a reduced-load approximation (RLA) for the sojourn times, similar to that of a single PS-queue. An important implication of the RLA is that the tail-optimal splitting rule is simply to choose αi proportional to ci − ρi, where ci is the capacity of network i and ρi is the load offered to network i by the corresponding background stream. This result provides a theoretical foundation for the effectiveness of such a simple splitting rule. Extensive simulations demonstrate that this simple rule indeed performs well, not only with respect to the tail asymptotics, but also with respect to the mean sojourn times. The simulations further support our conjecture that the same splitting rule is also tail-optimal for non-light foreground traffic. Finally, we observe near-insensitivity of the mean sojourn times with respect to the file-size distribution