Investigating the Performance of the MPT Multipath Communication Library in IPv4 and IPv6

Abstract

The currently used mobile devices (laptops, tablets, mobile phones) contain many built-in network cards for communication (e.g. Wi-Fi, 3G, Bluetooth, etc.). A natural request could be combining the resources of the different network connection possibilities in order to increase the throughput of the communication. Unfortunately the standard IP communication technology does not support it: the communication is restricted to one IP address (i.e. to one interface). The Multipath TCP (MPTCP) specification (appeared in January 2013) offers a Transport layer solution of using more than one interface in a TCP communication session. In this paper we investigate a Network layer solution. The MPT multipath communication library opens the multipath communication possibility in the Network layer. Using the MPT library, applications built on the UDP protocol are also able to perform multipath communication. The MPT library was developed by using a full dual-stack technology, which means the MPT based multipath environment can be used both in IPv4 and IPv6. Protocol version change is also possible: an IPv6 based application is able to run in an IPv4 multipath environment, and an IPv4 application can be used in an IPv6 multipath environment. In this paper we give a short overview on the MPT communication library’s working mechanism and detailed numerical examples will be shown to present how the MPT library aggregates the paths’ throughput in IPv4 and IPv6 environments. The main contribution of the paper is to demonstrate the effective throughput aggregation property of the MPT library in IPv6 and in mixed (i.e. protocol version change) environments.