Multipath communications at the Internet scale have been a myth for a long time, with no actual protocol being deployed so that multiple paths could be taken by a same connection on the way towards an Internet destination. Recently, the Multipath Transport Control Protocol (MPTCP) extension was standardized and is undergoing a quick adoption in many use-cases, from mobile to fixed access networks, from data-centers to core networks. Among its major benefits -i.e., reliability thanks to backup path rerouting; throughput increase thanks to link aggregation; and confidentiality thanks to harder capacity to intercept a full connection -the latter has attracted lower attention. How interesting would it be using MPTCP to exploit multiple Internet-scale paths hence decreasing the probability of man-in-the-middle (MITM) attacks is a question to which we try to answer. By analyzing the Autonomous System (AS) level graph, we identify which countries and regions show a higher level of robustness against MITM AS-level attacks, for example due to core cable tapping or route hijacking practices.

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As the internet and connected objects gain more and more in popularity, serving the ever-increasing data traffic becomes a challenge for the mobile operators. The traditional cellular radio access network (RAN), where each base station is co-located with its own processing unit and is responsible for a specific geographic area, has evolved first with the so-called Cloud RAN (C-RAN), and is currently undergoing further architectural evolution under the virtualized RAN (vRAN), Software-Defined RAN (SD-RAN), and Open RAN (O-RAN) architectures. In all these versions, the data processing units can be dynamically centralized into a pool and shared between several base stations, enlarging the geographical view for scheduling and resource allocation algorithms. For instance, resource utilisation is improved by avoiding resource idling during off-peak hours. C-RAN and vRAN gains depend strongly on the clustering scheme of radio units (RRHs and RUs). In this paper, we propose a novel radio clustering algorithm that takes into account both the traffic demand and the position of stations, by using the hyperbolic distance in 3-dimensions. We introduce a modified K-means clustering algorithm, called Hyperbolic K-means, and show that this generates geographically compact RU clusters with traffic charge equally shared among them. Application of our algorithm on real-world mobile data traffic, collected from the cities of Nantes and Lille in France, shows an increase in resource utilisation by 25%, and a reduction in deployment cost by 15%, compared to the standard RAN. Furthermore, the performance of our Hyperbolic K-means algorithm is compared extensively against alternative C-RAN clustering proposals from the literature and is shown to outperform them, in resource utilisation as well as in cost reduction.

Multipath communications at the Internet scale have been a myth for a long time, with no actual protocol being deployed at large scale. Recently, the Multipath Transmission Control Protocol (MPTCP) extension was standardized and is undergoing rapid adoption in many different use-cases, from mobile to fixed access networks, from data-centers to core networks. Among its major benefits-i.e., reliability thanks to backup path rerouting, throughput increase thanks to link aggregation, and confidentiality being more difficult to intercept a full connection-the latter has attracted lower attention. How effective would be to use MPTCP, or an equivalent multipath transport layer protocol, to exploit multiple Internet-scale paths and decrease the probability of Man-in-the-Middle (MITM) attacks is a question which we try to answer. By analyzing the Autonomous System (AS) level graph, we identify which countries and regions show a higher level of robustness against MITM AS-level attacks, for example due to core cable tapping or route hijacking practices.