Multipath Aware TCP (MATCP)

Abstract

On the Internet many different paths exist between each source and destination. When single path routing is used these paths can be under utilized, not used fairly or not used at all. One way to overcome this is to allow multipath routing. But when multiple paths are used TCP congestion control can be negatively affected and cause poor goodput performance due to the reordering of packets. We propose MATCP (Multipath Aware TCP) which makes modifications to TCP that allows it to monitor and select which path it takes through the network for each flow. MATCP is compared to single path routing and is validated using extensive simulation. MATCP is found to greatly improve fairness between flows while providing equal or better utilization of links than single best path networks. 1