User-space Multipath UDP in Mosh

In many network topologies, hosts have multiple IP addresses, and may choose among multiple network paths by selecting the source and destination addresses of the packets that they send. This can happen with multihomed hosts (hosts connected to multiple networks), or in multihomed networks using source-specific routing. A number of efforts have been made to dynamically choose between multiple addresses in order to improve the reliability or the performance of network applications, at the network layer, as in Shim6, or at the transport layer, as in MPTCP. In this paper, we describe our experience of implementing dynamic address selection at the application layer within the Mobile Shell. While our work is specific to Mosh, we hope that it is generic enough to serve as a basis for designing UDP-based multipath applications or even more general APIs

Systems and Methods for Measuring and Improving End-User Application Performance on Mobile Devices

In today's rapidly growing smartphone society, the time users are spending on their smartphones is continuing to grow and mobile applications are becoming the primary medium for providing services and content to users. With such fast paced growth in smart-phone usage, cellular carriers and internet service providers continuously upgrade their infrastructure to the latest technologies and expand their capacities to improve the performance and reliability of their network and to satisfy exploding user demand for mobile data. On the other side of the spectrum, content providers and e-commerce companies adopt the latest protocols and techniques to provide smooth and feature-rich user experiences on their applications. To ensure a good quality of experience, monitoring how applications perform on users' devices is necessary. Often, network and content providers lack such visibility into the end-user application performance. In this dissertation, we demonstrate that having visibility into the end-user perceived performance, through system design for efficient and coordinated active and passive measurements of end-user application and network performance, is crucial for detecting, diagnosing, and addressing performance problems on mobile devices. My dissertation consists of three projects to support this statement. First, to provide such continuous monitoring on smartphones with constrained resources that operate in such a highly dynamic mobile environment, we devise efficient, adaptive, and coordinated systems, as a platform, for active and passive measurements of end-user performance. Second, using this platform and other passive data collection techniques, we conduct an in-depth user trial of mobile multipath to understand how Multipath TCP (MPTCP) performs in practice. Our measurement study reveals several limitations of MPTCP. Based on the insights gained from our measurement study, we propose two different schemes to address the identified limitations of MPTCP. Last, we show how to provide visibility into the end- user application performance for internet providers and in particular home WiFi routers by passively monitoring users' traffic and utilizing per-app models mapping various network quality of service (QoS) metrics to the application performance.PHDComputer Science & EngineeringUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/146014/1/ashnik_1.pd

Reducing Transport Latency for Short Flows with Multipath TCP

Multipath TCP (MPTCP) has been an emerging transport protocol that provides network resilience to failures and improves throughput by splitting a data stream into multiple subflows across all the available multiple paths. While MPTCP is generally beneficial for throughput-sensitive large flows with large number of subflows, it may be harmful for latency-sensitive small flows. MPTCP assigns each subflow a congestion window, making short flows susceptible to timeout when a flow only contains a few packets. This condition becomes even worse when the paths have heterogeneous characteristics as packet reordering occurs and the slow paths can be used with MPTCP, causing the increased end-to-end delay and the lower application Goodput. Thus, it is important to choose the appropriate subflows for each MPTCP connection to achieve the good performance. However, the subflows in MPTCP are determined before a connection is established, and they usually remain unchanged during the lifetime of that connection. To address this issue, we propose DMPTCP, which dynamically adjusts the subflows according to application workloads. Specifically, DMPTCP first utilizes the idea of TCP modeling to estimate the latency on the path under scheduling and the data amount sent on the other paths simultaneously, and then decides the set of subflows to be used for certain application periodically with the goal of reducing completion time for short flows and achieving a higher throughput for long flows. We implement DMPTCP in a Linux server and conduct extensive experiments both in NS3 and in Linux testbed to validate its effectiveness. Our evaluation shows that DMPTCP decreases the completion time by over 46.55% compared to conventional MPTCP for short flows while increases the Goodput up to 21.3% for long-lived flows

Programmable Session Layer MULTI-Connectivity

Our devices can use a wide range of communication technologies such as multiple cellular technologies (4G/5G), WiFi, and also Ethernet. At the same time, applications have a choice of a wide range of transport protocols such as QUIC and TCP that can be fine-tuned and optimized according to their needs. However, in spite of these advances, offering seamless multiconnectivity to applications continues to be a hard problem. The key factors that continue to be a roadblock towards achieving seamless multiconnectivity include a) applications cannot specify the communication technologies to be used by their flows, and b) the traditional definition of a connection endpoint was not designed to support mobile nodes. In this paper we discuss the key challenges that make this problem hard. We also present MULTI, a session layer approach that can be leveraged to address some of the key sub-problems of this problem. For instance, we observe that MULTI incurred a small overhead (less than 5% decrease in throughput) when using TCP compared to the native asyncio python library.Peer reviewe

De-ossifying the Internet Transport Layer : A Survey and Future Perspectives

ACKNOWLEDGMENT The authors would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their useful suggestions and comments.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Reducing Transport Latency for Short Flows with Multipath TCP

Multipath TCP (MPTCP) has been an emerging transport protocol that provides network resilience to failures and improves throughput by splitting a data stream into multiple subflows across all the available multiple paths. While MPTCP is generally beneficial for throughput-sensitive large flows with large number of subflows, it may be harmful for latency-sensitive small flows. MPTCP assigns each subflow a congestion window, making short flows susceptible to timeout when a flow only contains a few packets. This condition becomes even worse when the paths have heterogeneous characteristics as packet reordering occurs and the slow paths can be used with MPTCP, causing the increased end-to-end delay and the lower application Goodput. Thus, it is important to choose the appropriate subflows for each MPTCP connection to achieve the good performance. However, the subflows in MPTCP are determined before a connection is established, and they usually remain unchanged during the lifetime of that connection. To address this issue, we propose DMPTCP, which dynamically adjusts the subflows according to application workloads. Specifically, DMPTCP first utilizes the idea of TCP modeling to estimate the latency on the path under scheduling and the data amount sent on the other paths simultaneously, and then decides the set of subflows to be used for certain application periodically with the goal of reducing completion time for short flows and achieving a higher throughput for long flows. We implement DMPTCP in a Linux server and conduct extensive experiments both in NS3 and in Linux testbed to validate its effectiveness. Our evaluation shows that DMPTCP decreases the completion time by over 46.55% compared to conventional MPTCP for short flows while increases the Goodput up to 21.3% for long-lived flows

Concurrent multipath transmission to improve performance for multi-homed devices in heterogeneous networks

Recent network technology developments have led to the emergence of a variety of access network technologies - such as IEEE 802.11, wireless local area network (WLAN), IEEE 802.16, Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access (WIMAX) and Long Term Evolution (LTE) - which can be integrated to offer ubiquitous access in a heterogeneous network environment. User devices also come equipped with multiple network interfaces to connect to the different network technologies, making it possible to establish multiple network paths between end hosts. However, the current connectivity settings confine the user devices to using a single network path at a time, leading to low utilization of the resources in a heterogeneous network and poor performance for demanding applications, such as high definition video streaming. The simultaneous use of multiple network interfaces, also called bandwidth aggregation, can increase application throughput and reduce the packets' end-to-end delays. However, multiple independent paths often have heterogeneous characteristics in terms of offered bandwidth, latency and loss rate, making it challenging to achieve efficient bandwidth aggregation. For instance, striping the flow's packets over multiple network paths with different latencies can cause packet reordering, which can significantly degrade performance of the current transport protocols. This thesis proposes three new solutions to mitigate the effects of network path heterogeneity on the performance of various concurrent multipath transmission settings. First, a network layer solution is proposed to stripe packets of delay-sensitive and high-bandwidth applications for concurrent transmission across multiple network paths. The solution leverages the paths' latency heterogeneity to reduce packet reordering, leading to minimal reordering delay, which improves performance of delay-sensitive applications. Second, multipath video streaming is developed for H.264 scalable video, where the reference video packets are adaptively assigned to low loss network paths to reduce drifting errors, thus combatting H.264 video distortion effectively. Finally, a new segment scheduling framework - which carefully considers path heterogeneity - is incorporated into the IETF Multipath TCP to improve throughput performance. The proposed solutions have been validated using a series of simulation experiments. The results reveal that the proposed solutions can enable efficient bandwidth aggregation for concurrent multipath transmission over heterogeneous network paths

Reducing Internet Latency : A Survey of Techniques and their Merit

Bob Briscoe, Anna Brunstrom, Andreas Petlund, David Hayes, David Ros, Ing-Jyh Tsang, Stein Gjessing, Gorry Fairhurst, Carsten Griwodz, Michael WelzlPeer reviewedPreprin