Multipath TCP, or MPTCP, is a widely-researched mechanism that allows a single application-level connection to be split to more than one TCP stream, and consequently more than one network interface, as opposed to the traditional TCP/IP model. Being a transport layer protocol, MPTCP can easily interact between the application using it and the network supporting it. However, MPTCP does not have control of its own route. Default IP routing behavior generally takes all traffic through the shortest or best-metric path. However, this behavior may actually cause paths to collide with each other, creating contention for bandwidth in a number of edges. This can result in a bottleneck which limits the throughput of the network. Therefore, a multipath routing mechanism is necessary to ensure smooth operation of MPTCP. We created smoc, a Simple Multipath OpenFlow Controller, that uses only topology information of the network to avoid collision where possible. Evaluation of smoc in a virtual local-area and a physical wide-area SDNs showed favorable results as smoc provided better performance than simple or spanning-tree routing mechanisms.

A large amount of scientific data needs to be transferred from one site to another as fast as possible in the computational science fields. High-speed data transfer between sites is very important, especially in the Grid computing field; GridFTP has been widely used for bulk data transfer over a wide area network. GridFTP achieves greater performance by supporting parallel TCP streams. Using parallel TCP streams improves the throughput of slow-start algorithms and lossy networks even on a single path. This research proposes a traffic engineering technique that increases the data transfer performance by using multiple paths simultaneously for the parallel TCP streams. For this purpose, we use SoftwareDefined Network (SDN) technology and its implementation, OpenFlow. This paper presents the design and implementation of the proposed system. Our performance evaluation demonstrates that our proposed system can accelerate GridFTP Transfer in both virtual and real global-scale environments.

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The Pacific Rim Application and Grid Middleware Assembly (PRAGMA) is an international community of researchers that actively collaborate to address problems and challenges of common interest in eScience. The PRAGMA Experimental Network Testbed (PRAGMA-ENT) was established with the goal of constructing an international software-defined network (SDN) testbed to offer the necessary networking support to the PRAGMA cyberinfrastructure. PRAGMA-ENT is isolated, and PRAGMA researchers have complete freedom to access network resources to develop, experiment, and evaluate new ideas without the concerns of interfering with production networks. In the first phase, PRAGMA-ENT focused on establishing an international L2 backbone.