The past, present, and future of transport-layer multipath

Abstract

Multipathing in communication networks is gaining momentum due to its attractive features of increased reliability, throughput, fault tolerance, and load balancing capabilities. In particular, wireless environments and datacenters are envisioned to become largely dependent on the power of multipathing for seamless handovers, virtual machine (VM) migration and in general, pooling less proficient resources together for achieving overall high proficiency. The transport layer, with its knowledge about end-to-end path characteristics, is well placed to enhance performance through better utilization of multiple paths. Realizing the importance of transport-layer multipath, this paper investigates the modernization of traditional connection establishment, flow control, sequence number splitting, acknowledgement, and flow scheduling mechanisms for use with multiple paths. Since congestion control defines fundamental feature of the transport layer, we study the working of multipath rate control and analyze its stability and convergence. We also discuss how various multipath congestion control algorithms differ in their window increase and decrease functions, their TCP-friendliness, and responsiveness. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first in-depth survey paper that has chronicled the evolution of the transport layer of the Internet from the traditional singlepath TCP to the recent development of the modern multipath TCP (MPTCP) protocol. Along with describing the history of this evolution, we also highlight in this paper the remaining challenges and research issues.

Tuning high flow concurrency for MPTCP in data center networks

“…Compared with the flow-based and packet-based load balancing designs, MPTCP transmits data in unit of subflow to make good use of multipath resources and meanwhile avoid packet reordering in subflows. To improve the MPTCP performance in data center networks, a rich body of work [2,6,[25][26][27][28][29] has thus emerged. In order to understand the performance of MPTCP protocol better, the literature [30,31] tests the influence of different topologies and traffic distributions on MPTCP.…”

On Analysis of Traffic Flow Demultiplexing Effectiveness

“…По существу, MPTCP вводит дополнительный демультиплексирующий промежуточный слой, API которого полностью совместим со стандартным интерфейсом TCP сокета и чьи подпотоки существуют в сети как обычные TCP сессии. Этот промежуточный слой послужил основой для тестирования десятка различных идей по демультиплексированию потока [7]. Все подходы к демультиплексированию транспортных потоков можно разделить на статические и динамические.…”

DASHing towards hollywood

“…There are several advantages of multihoming including increased availability, reliability, load balancing, and throughput. Multipath transmission solutions from the research community range from link, network, transport, application as well as cross-layer levels [69,51,36]. It is especially considered beneficial to voice and video calls, which will ordinarily be dropped in the event of network failure but can use path redundancy for keeping the connection active.…”