MultiPath TCP: From Theory to Practice

Sébastien Barré (1) , Christoph Paasch (1) , Olivier Bonaventure (1)

1 UCL - Université Catholique de Louvain = Catholic University of Louvain

The IETF is developing a new transport layer solution, MultiPath TCP (MPTCP), which allows to efficiently exploit several Internet paths between a pair of hosts, while presenting a single TCP connection to the application layer. From an implementation viewpoint, multiplexing flows at the transport layer raises several challenges. We first explain how this major TCP extension affects the Linux TCP/IP stack when considering the establishment of TCP connections and the transmission and reception of data over multiple paths. Then, based on our implementation of MultiPath TCP in the Linux kernel, we explain how such an implementation can be optimized to achieve high performance and report measurements showing the performance of receive buffer tuning and coupled congestion control.

Mots clés: TCP; multipath; implementation; measurements

Domaines: Informatique [cs]; Réseaux et télécommunications [cs.NI]

Sébastien Barré, Christoph Paasch, Olivier Bonaventure. MultiPath TCP: From Theory to Practice. 10th IFIP Networking Conference (NETWORKING), May 2011, Valencia, Spain. pp.444-457, ⟨10.1007/978-3-642-20757-0_35⟩. ⟨hal-01583423⟩