Tuning the Aggressive Slow-Start Behavior of MPTCP for Short Flows

Abstract

With the widespread availability of multi-homed devices, enabling multiple paths by utilizing multipath TCP (MPTCP) in current networks is a common practice to improve the performance and robustness. Although MPTCP improves both bandwidth efficiency and network reliability, the transmission performance for short flows can become worse than regular single path TCP when the concurrent subflows transferred through a shared bottleneck due to MPTCP’s aggressive slow start behavior, which is uncoupled, and each subflow behaves independently as regular TCP, affecting MPTCP and concurrent traffic at the bottleneck. In this paper, we first reveal that the MPTCP’s aggressive behavior in slow start causes timeouts and throughput collapse. We further present the design and implementation of GSAM, which employs the theoretical analysis to derive the appropriate threshold for smoothing the congestion window growth in GSAM according to the network conditions in slow start phase and leverages congestion detection and control at end-host to avoid buffer overflow under concurrent MPTCP connections with multiple subflows sharing the bottleneck. The experimental results based on the real implementations show that the GSAM reduces the completion time by up to 80% while retaining high Goodput for large flows as MPTCP.