Programmable Session Layer MULTI-Connectivity

Seppo Hatonen,Sasu Tarkoma,Ashwin Rao

doi:10.1109/access.2021.3137991

Seppo Hatonen, Sasu Tarkoma + Show 1 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1109/access.2021.3137991

Copy DOI

Abstract

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 5compared to the native asyncio python library.

Highlights

Our mobile devices, including laptops and smart phones, can use multiple different communication technologies and multiple transport protocols
We present an example of a programmable session layer solution, MULTI, that is aimed at addressing some key subproblems of this problem
MPTCP is a good replacement for TCP, but its deployment is hindered by the Internet ossification and middleboxes

Summary

Introduction

Our mobile devices, including laptops and smart phones, can use multiple different communication technologies and multiple transport protocols. Utilizing these technologies and protocols to their full potential continues to be difficult and off-the-shelf mobile devices still continue to use a single communication technology for data transfer. Android devices give WiFi a higher priority than cellular due to different reasons such as monetary, bandwidth or latency [1]. There have been many different multiconnectivity solutions developed over the years. These solutions operate in different levels of the network stack, such as network, transport, and application layers. We discuss why multiconnectivity is still hard in the current Internet

Objectives

Results

Discussion

Conclusion