An overview of Multipath TCP and its applications

Опубликовано 28 июля 2016, 0:49

Networks have become multipath: mobile devices have multiple radio interfaces, datacenters have redundant paths and multihoming is the norm for big server farms. Meanwhile, TCP is still only single-path and this makes it very difficult for endpoints to take advantage of network-level redundancy . There are numerous examples of problems caused by this mismatch: for instance, TCP connections are reset when a mobile device exits WiFi coverage despite the availability of 3G connections; and in datacenters random load-balancing often overloads a subset of links leaving parts of the network underutilized. In this talk I will present an overview of our work on Multipath TCP, an extension of TCP that is being standardized at the IETF. Multipath TCP enables unmodified applications that today use TCP to function over multiple paths and achieve better performance and better robustness. Multipath TCP also requires no changes to the networks: it works just fine over the existing infrastructure. Finally, I will briefly cover the most compelling applications of Multipath TCP, namely datacenters and mobile centers.