Subject: [multipathtcp] a measurement study of multipath TCP in the wild

From: Yung-Chih Chen <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 30 Aug 2013 15:15:56 -0400

Dear MultiPath TCP community:

We have done some measurement study of multipath TCP performance over 
wireless networks (WiFi, 3G/4G LTE) and would like to share the results 
with you.
The goal is to understand how well mptcp performs in the wild under 
different scenarios,
as well as the effect of different congestion controllers (i.e., 
uncoupled New Reno, coupled, and olia).

Here is a pointer to the paper (will appear in IMC this year).
http://www.cs.umass.edu/~yungchih/publication/imc_mtcp.pdf

Best,
Yung-Chih

Abstract:
With the popularity of mobile devices and the pervasive use of cellular 
technology,
there is widespread interest in hybrid networks and on how to achieve 
robustness and good performance from them.
As most smart phones and mobile devices are equipped with dual 
interfaces (WiFi and 3G/4G),
a promising approach is through the use of multi-path TCP, which 
leverages path diversity to improve performance and provide robust data 
transfers.
We explore the performance of multi-path TCP in the wild, focusing on 
simple 2-path multi-path TCP scenarios.
We seek to answer the following questions:
How much can a user benefit from using multi-path TCP over cellular and 
WiFi relative to using the either interface alone?
What is the impact of flow size on average latency?
What is the effect of the rate/route control algorithm on performance?
We are especially interested in understanding how application level 
performance is affected when path characteristics (e.g., round trip 
times and loss rates) are diverse.
We address these questions by conducting measurements using one 
commercial Internet service provider and three major cellular carriers 
in the US.