# A Game-Theoretic Rent-Seeking Framework for Improving Multipath TCP Performance +
## 1 Introduction  
The ongoing development of 5G and gigabit WiFi solutions will considerably improve throughput and delay performance on future wireless networks. These developments offer new possibilities for enhancing existing applications by using multipath TCP (MPTCP) [1] to exploit multiple available network interfaces. Multipath TCP seamlessly aggregates the capacities of multiple access technologies, and it is now an integral part of ATSSS [2] (access traffic steering, switching, and splitting) for 5G [3]. A challenging design issue that arises is that of best using WiFi and non-WiFi 5G seamlessly [4] across a variety of applications and platforms. This is a challenge, since different applications impose different requirements and constraints for successful MPTCP usage. One example application is video streaming. This seems like an ideal use case for MPTCP, since it has been difficult to scale existing services to meet the growing traffic demands of mobile users. For some existing applications, such as online video conferencing, high-resolution video still suffers from jitter, unwanted glitches, and frozen screens when used over mobile networks. Augmented reality (AR) is another emerging application that faces similar challenges due to bandwidth demands. AR allows users with nomadic wireless devices to seamlessly access information by overlaying graphics and digital information upon their perception of the physical world. This enables immersive AR/VR applications, but requires dependable, low-latency, and high-bandwidth data communication. Vehicular networking is yet another application that could benefit from MPTCP [5]. For example, autonomous vehicles may need to send 3D views of their environment to remote monitoring servers under extremely tight deadlines to ensure safe operation. Similarly, unmanned aerial vehicles, such as delivery drones, have stringent communication requirements for navigating their dynamically changing environment in a cooperativefashion. One example of this would be using live video from multiple drones to anticipate obstacles ahead and avoid risky blind spots while on the move. These aforementioned applications have three key similarities. First, they are throughput-intensive. Second, they require low end-to-end delay. Third, they need reliable data packet transport. Although the mobile/wireless networking standards are evolving to support higher capacity requirements, existing transport-layer protocols (e.g., TCP, UDP, QUIC, and MPTCP) rarely provide adequate support for low-latency and high-throughput applications, especially in wireless networks. One oft-cited reason for this is the tendency of TCP congestion control to induce excessive buffering delay at the network bottleneck. Further compounding this problem are the vagaries of wireless channels, which often exhibit non-deterministic behavior in signal quality. Aside from the application aspects (5G/WiFi) mentioned above, the main motivation of this research is to advance the theoretical knowledge in the overhaul of MPTCP, which requires a major departure from the existing design. These theoretical challenges are discussed in the following. Motivation and Contributions  
[PERSON] et al. [6; 7] designed a distributed congestion control framework for obtaining a network equilibrium with an objective of achieving _proportional fairness_. This model holds as long as the TCP sources react to the sum of the congestion prices in their paths. Moreover, when the TCP sources react to the maximum of the prices in the network paths, the system instead achieves _max-min fairness_. Our main insight is that [PERSON]'s approach of _\"transforming the fairness problem into a game between TCP users\"_ shares several features with the [PERSON] _rent-seeking_ game [8]. The main differences will be discussed later. In coupled MPTCP algorithms, it is known that, if one path fails to meet the loss and delay constraints, then the subflows on other paths suffer [9; 10; 11].