Multipath Probabilistic Early Response TCP

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2012-10-19

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Abstract

Many computers and devices such as smart phones, laptops and tablet devices are now equipped with multiple network interfaces, enabling them to use multiple paths to access content over the network. If the resources could be used concurrently, end user experience can be greatly improved. The recent studies in MPTCP suggest that improved reliability, load balancing and mobility are feasible. The thesis presents a new multipath delay based algorithm, MPPERT (Multipath Probabilistic Early response TCP), which provides high throughput and efficient load balancing. In all-PERT environment, MPPERT suffers no packet loss and maintains much smaller queue sizes compared to existing MPTCP, making it suitable for real time data transfer. MP-PERT is suitable for incremental deployment in a heterogeneous environment. It also presents a parametrized approach to tune the amount of traffic shift off the congested path.

Multipath approach is benefited from having multiple connections between end hosts. However, it is desired to keep the connection set minimal as increasing number of paths may not always provide significant increase in the performance. Moreover, higher number of paths unnecessarily increase computational requirement. Ideally, we should suppress paths with low throughputs and avoid paths with shared bottlenecks. In case of MPTCP, there is no efficient way to detect a common bottleneck between subflows. MPTCP applies a constraint of best single-path TCP throughput, to ensure fair share at a common bottleneck link. The best path throughput constraint along with traffic shift, from more congested to less congested paths, provide better opportunity for the competing flows to achieve higher throughput. However, the disadvantage is that even if there are no shared links, the same constraint would decrease the overall achievable throughput of a multipath flow.

PERT, being a delay based TCP protocol, has continuous information about the state of the queue. This information is valuable in enabling MPPERT to detect subflows sharing a common bottleneck and obtain a smaller set of disjoint subflows. This information can even be used to switch from coupled (a set of subflows having interdependent increase/decrease of congestion windows) to uncoupled (independent increase/decrease of congestion windows) subflows, yielding higher throughput when best single-path TCP constraint is relaxed. The ns-2 simulations support MPPERT as a highly competitive multipath approach, suitable for real time data transfer, which is capable of offering higher throughput and improved reliability.

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