On the Benefits of Applying Experimental Design to Improve Multipath TCP

Multipath TCP, despite being an extension to TCP is still a relatively young protocol. Achieving high performance in a wide range of network conditions is still an issue. The paper On the Benefits of Applying Experimental Design to Improve Multipath TCP is an interesting paper that attempts to improve the performance of Multipath TCP. While many researchers focus on simulations and usually evaluate some network scenarios, often due to space limitations, this paper takes a different approach.

First, it applies the Experimental Design methodology develops by statisticians. This methodology allows to efficiently and accurately (from a statistical viewpoint) evaluate the performance of a system by taking into account the impact of various parameters and intelligently selecting their values.

Second, the improvements proposed to Multipath TCP are not simply applied and evaluated to a simplified model of Multipath TCP implemented inside a simulator. They are evaluated directly on Linux kernel implementation of Multipath TCP available from http://www.multipath-tcp.org . The measurements are performed on the mininet platform. The source code of the Linux implementation and all the measurement scripts are available from http://multipath-tcp.org/conext2013 . This ensures that any researcher or protocol developer can validate, reproduce and improve the algorithms described in the paper. In an ideal world, all research papers would provide the information that allow to quickly reproduce the research described in the paper…

Reference

[PKB2013] C. Paasch, R. Khalili, O. Bonaventure, On the Benefits of Applying Experimental Design to Improve Multipath TCP, Conext 2013, Dec. 2013, Santa Barbara, USA, http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2535372.2535403