Multipath TCP Research Articles

An Enhanced Multipath TCP

Since 2020, the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic and lockdown policy have changed our life drastically. Due to this, companies, offices, schools, etc. are running in online mode. Therefore, the demand for internet bandwidth is very popular nowadays. Due to an increase in demand for internet bandwidth and the availability of multihomed devices, multipath TCP (MPTCP), and e-adoption of emerging technology enhanced bandwidth by utilizing the bandwidth of all available networks simultaneously. This paper analyzes the working principle of the MPTCP so that each internet device can easily use MPTCP to achieve high bandwidth. Load distribution and its performance mainly depend on the congestion control algorithm and the packet scheduler. MPTCP has various existing packet scheduling algorithms and congestion control algorithms. Here, the authors compare the performance of MPTCP with each congestion control algorithm and packet scheduler one by one and try to find out the best-performing MPTCP. This paper also shows that the MPTCP helps COVID-19 patients in various aspects.

EE-MPTCP: An Energy-Efficient Multipath TCP Scheduler for IoT-Based Power Grid Monitoring Systems

The Internet-of-Things (IoT) based monitoring system has significantly promoted the intelligence and automation of power grids. The inspection robots and wireless sensors used in the monitoring system usually have multiple network interfaces to achieve high throughput and reliability transmission. The concurrent usage of these available interfaces with Multipath TCP (MPTCP) can enhance the quality of service of the communications. However, traditional MPTCP scheduling algorithms may bring about data disorder and even buffer blocking, which severely affects the transmission performance of MPTCP. And the common MPTCP improvement mechanisms for IoT lack sufficient attention to energy consumption, which is important for the battery-limited wireless sensors. With the aim to promote conservative energy without loss of throughput, this paper develops an integrated multipath scheduler for energy consumption optimization named energy-efficient MPTCP (EE-MPTCP). EE-MPTCP first constructs a target optimization function which considers both network throughput and energy consumption. Then, based on the proposed MPTCP transmission model and existing energy efficiency model, the network throughput and energy consumption of each path can be estimated. Finally, a heuristic scheduling algorithm is proposed to find a suitable set of paths for each application. As confirmed by experiments based on Linux testbed as well as the NS3 simulation platform, the proposed scheduler can shorten the average completion time and reduce the energy consumption by up to 79.9% and 79.2%, respectively.

Adaptive cross-layer handover algorithm based on MPTCP for hybrid LiFi-and-WiFi networks

In this paper, an adaptive cross-layer handover algorithm based on multipath transmission control protocol (MPTCP) is proposed to solve the handover problem in hybrid light fidelity (LiFi) and wireless fidelity (WiFi) networks (HLWNets). According to this algorithm, the system can adapt to the user’s business type and behavioral characteristics to achieve seamless handover. By constructing nine evaluation indicators considering three dimensions of real-time network attributes, user mobility characteristics, and service demands for the network, the user mobility index (MI) is defined. By using the fuzzy analytic hierarchy process (FAHP)- the technique for order preferences by similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS) to conduct sub-item and overall analysis of the three types of indicators, the user’s mobile score is obtained, and the required MPTCP mode is determined to realize the cross-layer assistance accordingly. By using MI and signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR), load balancing can be achieved and the handover margin (HOM) and the time to trigger (TTT) can be dynamically set. By this, compared with the standard and location-aware algorithms, the number of handovers is significantly reduced (by 71% and 28%) and the throughput is effectively increased (by 58% and 43%). Finally, by simulation, the effectiveness of the adaptive cross-layer handover algorithm based on MPTCP is demonstrated.

A Game-Theoretic Rent-Seeking Framework for Improving Multipath TCP Performance

There is no well-defined utility function for existing multipath TCP algorithms. Therefore, network utility maximization (NUM) for MPTCP is a complex undertaking. To resolve this, we develop a novel condition under which Kelly’s NUM mechanism may be used to explicitly compute the equilibrium. We accomplish this by defining a new utility function for MPTCP by employing Tullock’s rent-seeking paradigm from game theory. We investigate the convergence of no-regret learning in the underlying network games with continuous actions. Based on our understanding of the design space, we propose an original MPTCP algorithm that generalizes existing algorithms and strikes a good balance among the important properties. We implemented this algorithm in the Linux kernel, and we evaluated its performance experimentally.

Reinforcement Learning Based Multipath QUIC Scheduler for Multimedia Streaming.

With the recent advances in computing devices such as smartphones and laptops, most devices are equipped with multiple network interfaces such as cellular, Wi-Fi, and Ethernet. Multipath TCP (MPTCP) has been the de facto standard for utilizing multipaths, and Multipath QUIC (MPQUIC), which is an extension of the Quick UDP Internet Connections (QUIC) protocol, has become a promising replacement due to its various advantages. The multipath scheduler, which determines the path to which each packet should be transmitted, is a key function that affects the multipath transport performance. For example, the default minRTT scheduler typically achieves good throughput, while the redundant scheduler gains low latency. While the legacy schedulers may generally give a desirable performance in some environments, however, each application renders different requirements. For example, Web applications target low latency, while video streaming applications require low jitter and high video quality. In this paper, we propose a novel MPQUIC scheduler based on deep reinforcement learning using the Deep Q-Network (DQN) that enhances the quality of multimedia streaming. Our proposal first takes into account both delay and throughput as a reward for reinforcement learning to achieve a low video chunk download time. Second, we propose a chunk manager that informs the scheduler of the video chunk information, and we also tune the learning parameters to explore new random actions adequately. Finally, we implement our new scheduler on the Linux kernel and give results using the Mininet experiments. The evaluation results show that our proposal outperforms legacy schedulers by at least 20%.

MuSher: An Agile Multipath-TCP Scheduler for Dual-Band 802.11ad/ac Wireless LANs

Future WLAN devices will combine both IEEE 802.11ad and 802.11ac interfaces. The former provides multi-Gbps rates but is susceptible to blockage, whereas the latter is slower but offers reliable connectivity. A fundamental challenge is thus how to combine those complementary technologies, to make the most of the advantages they offer. In this work, we leverage Multipath TCP (MPTCP) to use both interfaces simultaneously in order to achieve a higher overall throughput as well as seamlessly switch to a single interface when the other one fails. We find that standard MPTCP often performs sub-optimally and can yield a throughput much lower than that of single path TCP over the faster of the two interfaces. We analyze the cause of these performance issues in detail and then design <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">MuSher</i> , an agile MPTCP scheduler that allows MPTCP to fully utilize the channel resources available to both interfaces. Our evaluation in realistic scenarios shows that <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">MuSher</i> can provide a throughput improvement of 50%/130% under WLAN/Internet settings respectively, compared to the default MPTCP scheduler. It further speeds up the recovery of a traffic stream after disruption by a factor of 8x/75x.

CMT-SCTP and MPTCP Multipath Transport Protocols: A Comprehensive Review

A huge amount of generated data is regularly exploding into the network by the users through smartphones, laptops, tablets, self-configured Internet-of-things (IoT) devices, and machine-to-machine (M2M) communication. In such a situation, satisfying critical quality-of-service (QoS) requirements (e.g., throughput, latency, bandwidth, and reliability) is a large challenge as a vast amount of data travels into the network. Nowadays, strict QoS requirements must be satisfied efficiently in many networked multimedia applications when intelligent multi-homed devices are used. Such devices support the concept of multi-homing. To be precise, they have multiple network interfaces that aim to connect and communicate concurrently with different networking technologies. Therefore, many multipath transport protocols are provided to multi-homed devices, which aim (1) to take advantage of several network paths at the transport layer (Layer-4) and (2) to meet the strict QoS requirements for providing low network latency, higher data rates, and increased reliability. To this end, this survey first presents the challenges/problems for supporting multipath transmission with possible solutions. Then, it reviews recent research efforts related to the concurrent multipath transmission (CMT) protocol and the multipath transmission control protocol (MPTCP). It reviews the latest research efforts by considering (1) how a multipath transport protocol operates (i.e., its functionality); (2) in what type of network; (3) what path characteristics it should consider; and (4) how it addresses various design challenges. Furthermore, it presents some lessons learned and discusses open research issues in multipath transport protocols.

Efficient Key Exchange Using Identity-Based Encryption in Multipath TCP Environment

Across the globe, wireless devices with Internet facilities such as smartphones and tablets have become essential assets for communication and entertainment alike for everyday life for millions of people, which increases the network traffic and the demand for low-latency communication networks. The fourth-generation (4G)/long-term evolution (LTE)/ fifth-generation (5G) communication technology offers higher bandwidth and low latency services, but resource utilization and resiliency cannot be achieved, as transmission control protocol (TCP) is the most common choice for most of the state-of-art applications for the transport layer. An extension of TCP—multipath TCP (MPTCP)—offers higher bandwidth, resiliency, and stable connectivity by offering bandwidth aggregation and smooth handover among multiple paths. However, MPTCP uses multiple disjointed paths for communication to offer multiple benefits. A breach in the security of one of the paths may have a negative effect on the overall performance, fault-tolerance, robustness, and quality of service (QoS). In this paper, the research focuses on how MPTCP options such as MP_CAPABLE, ADD_ADDR, etc., can be used to exploit the vulnerabilities to launch various attacks such as session hijacking, traffic diversion, etc., to compromise the availability, confidentiality, and integrity of the data and network. The probable security solutions for securing MPTCP connections are analyzed, and the secure key exchange model for MPTCP (SKEXMTCP) based on identity-based encryption (IBE) is proposed and implemented. The parameters exchanged during the initial handshake are encrypted using IBE to prevent off-path attacks by removing the requirement for key exchange before communication establishment by allowing the use of arbitrary strings as a public key for encryption. The experiments were performed with IBE and an elliptic curve cryptosystem (ECC), which show that IBE performs better, as it does not need to generate keys while applying encryption. The experimental evaluation of SKEXMTCP in terms of security and performance is carried out and compared with existing solutions.

A path characteristics based adaptive subflow switching algorithm for dynamic heterogeneous MPTCP network

Multipath Transmission Control Protocol (MPTCP) can support simultaneous transmission of data packets over multiple paths, improve transmission reliability and aggregate network bandwidth to improve throughput. However, MPTCP cannot adjust the access state of subflows in real time according to the actual situation in the dynamic network, resulting in poor performance under the limitation of limited buffers. The existing path management algorithms, such as Fullmesh and PCDC, only select the subflows for concurrent transmission at the beginning, and cannot dynamically manage the subflow during the transmission. Therefore, we propose a path characteristics based adaptive subflow switching management (PASS) algorithm to manage multiple paths of MPTCP in real time and dynamically manage whether a subflow joins the transmission or not. Experimental results show that PASS is more stable and flexible than traditional Fullmesh algorithm and PCDC algorithm, and can obtain higher network throughput.

An Experiential Study of Multipath TCP Schedulers With the Comparison of Throughput, Latency, and Path Utilization

Advanced internet technology and data-hungry applications encourage us to use Multipath TCP (MPTCP). MPTCP can use many homogenous or heterogeneous interfaces like LTE, Wi-Fi, Ethernet, etc. simultaneously. This inherently introduces out of order packets(OFO) scenario at the receiver side. If packets are not collected in sequence at the receiver then after a timeout, retransmission and spurious retransmission may occur thus increasing overhead and decreasing the quality of user experience. To optimize this, an efficient MPTCP scheduling algorithm becomes essential. This article studies and compares a few MPTCP schedulers theoretically and practically using key performance metrics. Comparative study of data points suggests that known schedulers of MPTCP do perform well in uniform network environments, but are inflexible to adapt to dynamic environments with the constant flux in network states of wired/wireless and homogeneous/heterogeneous setup. This calls for a flexible algorithm that can learn the network state and adapt to it for optimized network performance.

Empirical Mode Decomposition-empowered Network Traffic Anomaly Detection for Secure Multipath TCP Communications

Empirical Mode Decomposition-empowered Network Traffic Anomaly Detection for Secure Multipath TCP Communications

A Q-Learning Driven Energy-Aware Multipath Transmission Solution for 5G Media Services

Supported by the latest evolution of the 5G technologies, Augmented Reality (AR) & Virtual Reality (VR) video streaming services are experiencing an unprecedented growth. However, the transmission issues caused by heterogeneous access and dynamic traffic are still challenging 5G communications. The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF)’s Multipath Transmission Control Protocol (MPTCP) can aggregate bandwidth and balance traffic across multiple subflows in a heterogeneous network environment. However, in order to support delivery of high quality 5G media services, researchers should also address MPTCP’s inefficient data scheduling to heterogenous sub-paths, consideration of multiple criteria, including energy consumption and its inconsistent behavior when employed along with the Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (DASH) adaptive application layer protocol. To address these issues, we propose a Q-Learning driven Energy-aware Data Scheduling (QLE-DS) mechanism for MPTCP-based media services. QLE-DS models the multipath scheduling as a Q-learning process and employs a novel quantum clustering approach to discretize the high dimensional continuous Q-table. An asynchronous framework is designed to improve the learning efficiency of QLE-DS. The simulation results show that QLE-DS performs better than other MPTCP scheduling algorithms in terms of flow completion time (FCT), retransmission rate, and energy consumption.

Choosing a Proper Control Strategy for Multipath Transmission in Industry 4.0 Applications

The industrial applications, especially in the context of communication-intensive Industry 4.0, require high throughput, good robustness, and low latency in the data exchange among the system components. These objectives can be achieved through multipath transfer. In order to overcome the restrictions of the primary networking protocols with respect to engaging multiple network interfaces, a new version of transmission control protocol (TCP) has recently been standardized—multipath TCP (MPTCP). Still though, only one type of congestion control algorithm is used to manage the flow of data despite various choices available in the modern operating systems, which leads to nonoptimal transfer dynamics. In this article, the influence of TCP congestion control algorithms, operating at the path and MPTCP level, on the transmission quality in industrial applications is examined. The conducted experiments involving physical devices and real, public networks lead to a set of recommendations for the algorithm selection so that the premises of robustness and efficiency are met. The default algorithm configuration is found ill-suited, yielding priority to nonhomogeneous settings. Only a few algorithms can maintain the benefits of multiplicity for an on-going transmission when the transfer conditions at one or more paths deteriorate. Motivated by the deficiency of common solutions, a new MPTCP congestion control algorithm has been developed. While retaining their good properties in the general networking context, this new–robust–algorithm yields improved performance in the uncertain, industrial communication environment.

Multipath Transmission Control Protocol for Live Virtual Machine Migration in the Cloud Environment

For mobile cloud computing (MCC), a local virtual machine- (VM-) based cloudlet is proposed to improve the performance of real-time resource-intensive mobile applications. When a mobile device (MD) discovers a cloudlet nearby, it takes some time to build up a virtual machine (VM) inside the cloudlet before data offloading from the MD to the VM can begin. Live virtual machine migration refers to the process of transferring a running Virtual Machine (VM) from one host to another without interrupting its state. Theoretically, live migration process must not render the instance being migrated unavailable during its execution. However, in practice, there is always a service downtime associated with the process. This paper focuses on addressing the need to reduce the service downtime in case of live VM migration in cloud and providing a solution by implementing and optimizing the multipath transmission control protocol (MPTCP) ability within an Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) cloud to increase the efficiency of live migration. We have also introduced an algorithm, the α-best fit algorithm, to optimize the usage of bandwidth and to effectively streamline the MPTCP performance.

Fast Path Reservation Scheduler

In multihomed devices, Multipath Transmission Control Protocol is a transport layer protocol that allows TCP segments to be sent over several paths. We look at several Multipath TCP schedulers in this study and highlight some current outstanding concerns including head-of-line blocking, bandwidth aggregation, and out-of-order packets. The majority of these difficulties degrade MPTCP performance, which may be improved by constructing an MPTCP scheduler properly. Then, utilizing the bandwidth of all potential routes, we develop a novel MPTCP packet scheduler dubbed a Fast path reservation scheduler that not only helps to solve the aforesaid problems, but also delivers optimal throughput with a short execution time. The size of the receiver buffer or the size of the data being transmitted have no effect on the performance of FPRS, which transmits packets of data to the receiver in the order they were received. Both empirically and analytically, we show that the suggested scheduler outperforms the competition.

Network coding and MPTCP: Enhancing security and performance in an SDN environment

Recently, several attempts have been made to jointly secure end-to-end network communication systems against various malicious attacks, and enhance its performance level. Network coding, which is a step forward towards realizing these systems, promises many advantages such as increased throughput and enhanced reliability. However, several security concerns remain an open issue. A major limitation is the unreliable broadcast nature of network channels. One possible solution is to leverage MPTCP (Multi-Path Transmission Control Protocol), and to utilize a secure variant of the Network Coding (NC) technique to secure reliable data transmission over multiple paths. Such a system is possible when integrated in a Software Defined Networking (SDN) environment. In this paper, the conventional Random Linear Network Coding (RLNC) technique is modified and employed in a secure MPTCP-enabled end-to-end system. This variant is referred to as secret coding, where communicating entities multiply the transmitted data with invertible secret coding matrices to achieve data confidentiality and data availability, while maintaining the desired system performance. Each user will separately derive the coding coefficients of the secret coding matrices from the channel and a common secret, which significantly reduces the communication overhead. The proposed solution exhibits several properties such as high efficiency, flexibility, low error propagation and low execution time. In order to further improve the security and performance of the proposed scheme, the SDN controller is programmed to provide independent paths between the communicating MPTCP users. The obtained results prove that the proposed solution is able to achieve both the desired security level and performance.

Exploring Multipath TCP Schedulers in Heterogeneous Networks

Multipath Transmission Control Protocol (MPTCP) is a transport layer protocol, which transmits TCP segments on more than one path, in multihomed devices. It was designed with the aim of Bandwidth aggregation and redundant connections. Currently, multihomed devices have wireless interfaces of heterogeneous nature. MPTCP is not able to give its optimal performance in heterogeneous networks. This paper presents an experimental performance study of four different schedulers, namely Roundrobin, Default, Blest, and Redundant. Our testbed comprises Ethernet, LTE, and Wifi networks to connect multihomed devices. We have compared the scheduler performance in terms of Throughput , Download time and path utilization rate in homogenous and heterogenous scenarios . Results showed that Round robin provides optimal throughput in homogenous networks and also performs bandwidth aggregation by utilizing both the paths but fails to perform in heterogenous networks. Blest, provides best throughput among the four schedulers but prefers fast path only.

An Energy-Saving Scheduling Algorithm for Multipath TCP in Wireless Networks

Multipath TCP (MPTCP) allows the system to use available paths through multiple network interfaces. This aggregation of bandwidth increases the throughput of the network but also consumes more energy to maintain connections between multiple interfaces. Existing algorithms tend to shift traffic from the high energy path to the low energy path to save energy. However, when the performance of the less energy-intensive path deteriorates, continued use of that path will reduce throughput. To alleviate this issue and reduce energy consumption while ensuring network throughput, this paper proposes an energy-saving scheduling system named ES-MPTCP, which can be combined with the path management module to manage subflows, thereby determining the priority of subflows and which subflows to be used for data transmission. The ES-MPTCP algorithm designs a target optimization function based on path throughput and energy consumption to find different sets of suitable subflows for different applications to reduce energy consumption and guarantee throughput. The extensive experimental results based on the Linux real platform demonstrate that the ES-MPTCP algorithm has the best performance, which can improve throughput by 13.6%, reduce energy consumption by 16.2% and increase the energy efficiency up to 23%.

ECN-based shared bottleneck detection for multi-path TCP

Multi-Path TCP (MPTCP) shows its unique advantages over single-path TCP thanks to its aggregate throughput from multiple paths, balancing efficiency and fairness over multipath transmission. However, MPTCP senders should tackle the friendliness issue carefully when sharing the same bottleneck with single-path TCP. Unfortunately, existing shared bottleneck detection schemes either utilize end-to-end delay without consideration of multiple-bottleneck scenarios, or identify subflows on switches with large operation overhead. In this paper, we propose a lightweight yet accurate approach, ECN-based MPTCP (EMPTCP), to detect shared bottleneck of multiple subflows. EMPTCP uses the widely deployed ECN scheme to capture the real congestion state of shared bottlenecks, while at the same time is compatible with various MPTCP congestion control algorithms. Through model analysis, simulation test and real experiment, we show that EMPTCP achieves higher than 85% accuracy in shared bottleneck detection, thus improving the network efficiency and fairness.

An Experiential Study of Multipath TCP Schedulers With the Comparison of Throughput, Latency, and Path Utilization

Advanced internet technology and data-hungry applications encourage us to use Multipath TCP (MPTCP). MPTCP can use many homogenous or heterogeneous interfaces like LTE, Wi-Fi, Ethernet, etc. simultaneously. This inherently introduces out of order packets(OFO) scenario at the receiver side. If packets are not collected in sequence at the receiver then after a timeout, retransmission and spurious retransmission may occur thus increasing overhead and decreasing the quality of user experience. To optimize this, an efficient MPTCP scheduling algorithm becomes essential. This article studies and compares a few MPTCP schedulers theoretically and practically using key performance metrics. Comparative study of data points suggests that known schedulers of MPTCP do perform well in uniform network environments, but are inflexible to adapt to dynamic environments with the constant flux in network states of wired/wireless and homogeneous/heterogeneous setup. This calls for a flexible algorithm that can learn the network state and adapt to it for optimized network performance.