TCP Extensions for Multipath Operation with Multiple Addresses

By Alan Ford, Costin Raiciu, Mark James Handley, Olivier Bonaventure. Request for Comments, 2020

1,554 citations recorded by the source corpus.

TCP/IP communication is currently restricted to a single path per connection, yet multiple paths often exist between peers. The simultaneous use of these multiple paths for a TCP/IP session would improve resource usage within the network and, thus, improve user experience through higher throughput and improved resilience to network failure. Multipath TCP provides the ability to simultaneously use multiple paths between peers. This document presents a set of extensions to traditional TCP to support multipath operation. The protocol offers the same type of service to applications as TCP (i.e., reliable bytestream), and it provides the components necessary to establish and use multiple TCP flows across potentially disjoint paths. This document defines an Experimental Protocol for the Internet community.

Subfields: Computer Networks and Communications

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b62375302c4ebc6cc5e3968d11aee757787f0fa2

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In Computer Networks and Communications

Citations in the corpus

Data Offloading Techniques in Cellular Networks: A Survey (2015, neutral): “valuable option to provide multiple connectivity over different interfaces [93].”
How Hard Can It Be? Designing and Implementing a Deployable Multipath TCP (2012, background): “Multipath TCP[5] is an attempt to extend the TCP protocol to perform this role.”
On the impact of packet spraying in data center networks (2013, methodology): “The first effort, MPTCP[7], splits a TCP flow into multiple sub-flows at the end hosts, which are routed over different paths in the network using ECMP.”
Experimental evaluation of multipath TCP schedulers (2014, background): “Multipath TCP is a major extension to TCP, allowing the use of multiple paths between two end-hosts for the transmission of a single data stream [6].”
PINT: Probabilistic In-band Network Telemetry (2020, methodology): “, when using flowlet load balancing [2, 42]) or multiple paths can be taken simultaneously when appropriate transport protocols such as Multipath TCP are used [25].”
Design, Implementation and Evaluation of Congestion Control for Multipath TCP (2011, methodology): “A more complete exposition of these constraints can be found in [21], and our protocol is precisely described in the currentmptcp draft [7].”
MPTCP Is Not Pareto-Optimal: Performance Issues and a Possible Solution (2013, background): “MPTCP discovers the number of paths available to a user, establishes the paths, and distributes traffic across these paths through creation of separate subflows [14], [15].”
Improving datacenter performance and robustness with multipath TCP (2011, methodology): “Multipath TCP[4] extends TCP so that a single connection can be striped across multiple network paths.”
Is it still possible to extend TCP? (2011, methodology): “We use an MP_CAPABLE option for test 1 and an MP_DATA option for test 2; both options are defined in a draft version of MPTCP [12] and neither is currently registered with IANA, and no known middlebox yet supports them.”