MultiPath TCP-communication (in NorNet Core)

Abstract

Technology is constantly evolving, and we are currently witnessing a digital revolution with a tremendous growth of interconnected devices. The scale of the Internet and the amount of transported data is constantly increasing. The need for reliability is also increasing, as users are constantly on the move, and are more dependent on cloud services. Utilizing the connectivity redundancy of devices is an interesting approach to deal with this increasing resource demand. In addition to ISPs and data centers implementing redundancy, lately we have also seen that end-user devices also do the same. The term multihoming describes the practice of being connected to multiple networks simultaneously. However, the most used transport protocols today, TCP and UDP, are not able to effectively take advantage of multihoming, as they are single-path transport protocols. In this thesis we will explore the newly proposed MultiPath TCP protocol, an extension of TCP, which enables the concurrent use of multiple network interfaces. This makes it possible for one data stream to be transferred over multiple paths on the Internet. In order to evaluate the performance of this protocol, we will test it according to its design goals set by the Internet Engineering Task Force, in the NorNet Core testbed.