Multipath TCP News : January 2016
Multipath TCP continues to attract interest from both academic researchers who write papers that use or improve the protocol as well as engineers from industry who are deploying new innovative services on top of this new TCP extension. In this newsletter that we’ll try to post every month on the Multipath TCP blog, we’ll summarise the main information about Multipath TCP that we have collected during the previous month. Feel free to contact Olivier Bonaventure if you would like to publish something in this newsletter.
Implementation news
The MPTCP-DEV mailing list has been pretty active during the last month. Three patches have been announced :
Three bug fixes pushed by Christoph Paasch :
- https://listes-2.sipr.ucl.ac.be/sympa/arc/mptcp-dev/2015-12/msg00027.html
- https://listes-2.sipr.ucl.ac.be/sympa/arc/mptcp-dev/2015-12/msg00031.html
- https://listes-2.sipr.ucl.ac.be/sympa/arc/mptcp-dev/2015-12/msg00026.html
A first implementation of the ADD_ADDR2 option by Fabrizio Demaria. This option was proposed in RFC6824bis and includes a HMAC to authenticate the advertised address.
Alexander Frommgen has announced a new website that can be used to verify that Multipath TCP works end-to-end : http://amiusingmptcp.de
This new website goes beyond the original http://amiusingmptcp.com that is not available anymore.
Another useful tool is an improved AndroidTracebox by Raffaele Zullo. It can be used on smartphones to detect middlebox interference in cellular and WiFi networks.
Scientific publications
December 2015 has been a busy month for scientific publications on Multipath TCP. Almost an entire session was devoted to Multipath TCP at Conext’2015 in Heidelberg with three papers :
- Design, Implementation and Evaluation of Energy-Aware Multi-Path TCP by Yeon-sup Lim et al. proposes a variant of Multipath TCP called eMPTCP that aims at minimising the energy consumption of Multipath TCP on smartphones. This is an expanded version of a earlier workshop paper by the same authors.
- An Anatomy of Mobile Web Performance over Multipath TCP by Bo Han et al. analyses by measurements how the utilisation of Multipath TCP affects the performance of Mobile websites.
- SMAPP : Towards Smart Multipath TCP-enabled APPlications by Benjamin Hesmans et al. proposes and evaluates a Netlink-based API that allows applications to control the utilisation of the Multipath TCP subflows.
Other papers have been posted.
- Performance Comparison of Congestion Control Strategies for Multi-Path TCP in the NORNET Testbed by Fa Fu et al. uses the Nornet testbed to compare the performance of different Multipath TCP congestion control schemes.
- System investigation of a gateway implementing subflow control policies using a multipath TCP proxy by Yu Okada et al. proposes and evaluates a Multipath TCP proxy running in userspace to bond several networks together.
- Exploiting Path Diversity in Datacenters using MPTCP-aware SDN by Savvas Zannettou et al. proposes to control the creation of subflows by an SDN controller. For this, they enhance the full-mesh path manager to create multiple subflows and the Floodlight SDN controller
- SAMPO: Online Subflow Association for Multipath TCP with Partial Flow Record by Yan Zhang proposes algorithms to extract Multipath TCP information from incomplete packet traces (e.g. packet traces collected with sampling or where the first packets of a flow have been lost).
IETF
The IETF mailing list has been rather quite during the last month. One relevant draft has been updated :
This draft addresses the Hybrid Access Networks, i.e. access networks that combine two different link layer technologies, typically DSL and LTE. The Broadband Forum is developing solutions to enable network operators to efficiently use two heterogeneous networks together and some of the proposed solutions rely on Multipath TCP. This draft proposes a TCP option similar to the one proposed in Multipath in the Middle(Box) and discusses how such a solution could be used to support UDP.