Abstract

By simultaneously using multiple paths through the Internet, multipath transport protocols have the potential to greatly improve performance, resilience and flexibility. Further, by linking the congestion behavior of the subflows of a connection, it is possible to move traffic away from congested paths, allowing network capacity to be pooled and better handling surges in traffic. We will build upon earlier theoretical work by Kelly/Voice and Key/Massoulie/Towsley to examine how to perform such linkage in a window-based transport protocol such as multipath TCP , while still achieving fairness in a world of different RTTs.

Multipath TCP has become of great interest to operating system vendors recently, especially for use on smart phones where there is no single right answer as to which of several radio interfaces to use at any instance. This work is now in the early stages of standardization in the IETF .

This is joint work with Damon Wischik and Costin Raiciu.