Performance evaluation of multipath transport protocol in heterogeneous network environments

Performance of multipath transport protocols is known to be sensitive to path asymmetry. The difference between each path in terms of bandwidth, delay and packet loss has a potential to significantly decrease the overall performance of a data flow carried over multiple asymmetric paths. In this paper, we evaluate and analyse reliable data transfer in Concurrent Multipath Transfer extension of Stream Control Transport Protocol (CMT-SCTP) under various conditions of network asymmetry, with a focus on the use case where 3G and Wi-Fi networks are simultaneously available. We identify various causes of performance degradation, review the impact of CMT-SACK extension under path asymmetry and show that the total achievable goodput of a reliable in-order data flow over multiple heterogeneous paths is ruled by the characteristics of the worst path as perceived by the transport protocol. To support our study, we derive a simple analytical model of the receiver window blocking and validate it via simulation

A Survey on Congestion Control and Scheduling for Multipath TCP: Machine Learning vs Classical Approaches

Multipath TCP (MPTCP) has been widely used as an efficient way for communication in many applications. Data centers, smartphones, and network operators use MPTCP to balance the traffic in a network efficiently. MPTCP is an extension of TCP (Transmission Control Protocol), which provides multiple paths, leading to higher throughput and low latency. Although MPTCP has shown better performance than TCP in many applications, it has its own challenges. The network can become congested due to heavy traffic in the multiple paths (subflows) if the subflow rates are not determined correctly. Moreover, communication latency can occur if the packets are not scheduled correctly between the subflows. This paper reviews techniques to solve the above-mentioned problems based on two main approaches; non data-driven (classical) and data-driven (Machine Learning) approaches. This paper compares these two approaches and highlights their strengths and weaknesses with a view to motivating future researchers in this exciting area of machine learning for communications. This paper also provides details on the simulation of MPTCP and its implementations in real environments.Comment: 13 pages, 7 figure

Performance Enhancement of Multipath TCP for Wireless Communications with Multiple Radio Interfaces

ArticleMultipath TCP (MPTCP) allows a TCP connection to operate across multiple paths simultaneously and becomes highly attractive to support the emerging mobile devices with various radio interfaces and to improve resource utilization as well as connection robustness. The existing multipath congestion control algorithms, however, are mainly loss-based and prefer the paths with lower drop rates, leading to severe performance degradation in wireless communication systems where random packet losses occur frequently. To address this challenge, this paper proposes a new mVeno algorithm, which makes full use of the congestion information of all the subflows belonging to a TCP connection in order to adaptively adjust the transmission rate of each subflow. Specifically, mVeno modifies the additive increase phase of Veno so as to effectively couple all subflows by dynamically varying the congestion window increment based on the receiving ACKs. The weighted parameter of each subflow for tuning the congestio

Robust Mobile Data Transport: Modeling, Measurements, and Implementation

Advances in wireless technologies and the pervasive influence of multi-homed devices have significantly changed the way people use the Internet. These changes of user behavior and the evolution of multi-homing technologies have brought a huge impact to today\u27s network study and provided new opportunities to improve mobile data transport. In this thesis, we investigate challenges related to human mobility, with emphases on network performance at both system level and user level. More specifically, we seek to answer the following two questions: 1) How to model user mobility in the networks and use the model for network provisioning? 2) Is it possible to utilize network diversity to provide robust data transport in wireless environments? We first study user mobility in a large scale wireless network. We propose a mixed queueing model of mobility and show that this model can accurately predict both system-level and user-level performance metrics. Furthermore, we demonstrate how this model can be used for network dimensioning. Secondly, with the increasing demand of multi-homed devices that interact with heterogeneous networks such as WiFi and cellular 3G/4G, we explore how to leverage this path diversity to assist data transport. We investigate the technique of multi-path TCP (MPTCP) and evaluate how MPTCP performs in the wild through extensive measurements in various wireless environments using WiFi and cellular 3G/4G simultaneously. We study the download latencies of MPTCP when using different congestion controllers and number of paths under various traffic loads and over different cellular carriers. We further study the impact of short flows on MPTCP by modeling MPTCP\u27s delay startup mechanism of additional flows. As flow sizes increase, we observe that traffic in cellular networks exhibits large and varying packet round trip times, called bufferbloat. We analyze the phenomenon of bufferbloat, and illustrate how bufferbloat can result in numerous MPTCP performance issues. We provide an effective solution to mitigate the performance degradation. Finally, as popular content is replicated at multiple locations, we develop mechanisms that take advantage of this source diversity along with path diversity to provide robust mobile data transport. We demonstrate this in the context of online video streaming, because of its popularity and significant contribution to Internet traffic. We therefore propose MSPlayer, a client-based solution for online video streaming that adjusts network traffic distribution over each path to network dynamics. MSPlayer bypasses the deployment limitations of MPTCP while maintaining the benefits of path diversity, and exploits different content sources simultaneously. MSPlayer can significantly reduce video start-up latency and quickly refill playout buffer for high quality video streaming. We evaluate MSPlayer\u27s performance through YouTube

ResTP: A Configurable and Adaptable Multipath Transport Protocol for Future Internet Resilience

Motivated by the shortcomings of common transport protocols, e.g., TCP, UDP, and MPTCP, in modern networking and the belief that a general-purpose transport-layer protocol, which can operate efficiently over diverse network environments while being able to provide desired services for various application types, we design a new transport protocol, ResTP. The rapid advancement of networking technology and use paradigms is continually supporting new applications. The configurable and adaptable multipath-capable ResTP is not only distinct from the standard protocols by its flexibility in satisfying the requirements of different traffic classes considering the characteristics of the underlying networks, but by its emphasis on providing resilience. Resilience is an essential property that is unfortunately missing in the current Internet. In this dissertation, we present the design of ResTP, including the services that it supports and the set of algorithms that implement each service. We also discuss our modular implementation of ResTP in the open-source network simulator ns-3. Finally, the protocol is simulated under various network scenarios, and the results are analyzed in comparison with conventional protocols such as TCP, UDP, and MPTCP to demonstrate that ResTP is a promising new transport-layer protocol providing resilience in the Future Internet (FI)

SDN-BASED MECHANISMS FOR PROVISIONING QUALITY OF SERVICE TO SELECTED NETWORK FLOWS

Despite the huge success and adoption of computer networks in the recent decades, traditional network architecture falls short of some requirements by many applications. One particular shortcoming is the lack of convenient methods for providing quality of service (QoS) guarantee to various network applications. In this dissertation, we explore new Software-Defined Networking (SDN) mechanisms to provision QoS to targeted network flows. Our study contributes to providing QoS support to applications in three aspects. First, we explore using alternative routing paths for selected flows that have QoS requirements. Instead of using the default shortest path used by the current network routing protocols, we investigate using the SDN controller to install forwarding rules in switches that can achieve higher bandwidth. Second, we develop new mechanisms for guaranteeing the latency requirement by those applications depending on timely delivery of sensor data and control signals. The new mechanism pre-allocates higher priority queues in routers/switches and reserves these queues for control/sensor traffic. Third, we explore how to make the applications take advantage of the opportunity provided by SDN. In particular, we study new transmission mechanisms for big data transfer in the cloud computing environment. Instead of using a single TCP path to transfer data, we investigate how to let the application set up multiple TCP paths for the same application to achieve higher throughput. We evaluate these new mechanisms with experiments and compare them with existing approaches

Performance of MultiPath TCP on OpenWRT

Multipath TCP (MPTCP) je pokročilým rozšířením stávajícího TCP protokolu, které dokáže nabídnout více než standardní varianta. Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) je dosud nejrozšířenější metodou pro spolehlivou komunikaci přes rozsáhlé sítě. V současné době je protokol TCP omezen na komunikaci pouze jedinou originální cestou mezi zdrojem a cílem, i když je v dané chvíli k dispozici více alternativních cest. TCP nepodporuje multi homing. Tato vlastnost omezuje maximální možný datový tok, protože nelze využívat více linek najednou. MPTCP pomáhá překonat tento nedostatek. Protokol umožňuje rozdělit komunikaci do několika nezávislých TCP spojení a každé z nich může využívat jednu alternativní cestu k cíli komunikace. Díky tomu dokáže MPTCP zvýšit rychlost připojení, rovnoměrně rozdělovat zátěž mezi několik různých připojení k internetu a zároveň pomáhá udržet spojení i v případě výpadku některé z linek. V této práci budou vysvětleny rozdíly mezi MPTCP a TCP protokoly a zároveň jak MPTCP funguje. Dále bude podrobněji vysvětlen způsob jak zkompilovat linuxové jádro s podporou MPTCP v kombinaci se Shadowsocks pro operační systém LEDE. V další části práce bude navržena sada experimentů, které otestují vlastnosti MPTCP z hlediska datové propustnosti, přenosu velkých bloků dat, reakce na zvýšené komunikační zpoždění a reakce na zvýšenou ztrátovost komunikační linky. Hlavním cílem práce je analyzovat a vyhodnotit výkonnost MPTCP oproti TCP v operačním systému OpenWRT.Multipath TCP (MPTCP) is an advanced development of TCP/IP network which has better features when compared to TCP. Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) is the so far widely used method for data transfer and communication over network. Currently, TCP communication is limited to a single path which means no matter how many paths are available, data is transmitted only through single path at once from the source to the destination. TCP does not support multi homing. This feature restricts the use of bandwidth over the network. MPTCP is an evolution of TCP that supports multi homing which transmits data over multiple paths. Data transfer over multiple paths is achieved by distributing data over several TCP subows. Therefore, MPTCP provides better throughput, load balancing among available paths and better handling of network failure. In this thesis, I explain about the dierence between TCP and MPTCP, and how MPTCP works. I also explained in detail about MPTCP enabled Kernel patch along with Shadowsocks in LEDE (OpenWrt). Various experiments are carried out based on bandwidth, delay, loss and bulk data transfer to analyze the performance of MPTCP over TCP. The main goal of this thesis is to identify the performance analysis of MPTCP over normal TCP connection in OpenWRT