Benefit of Multipath TCP on the Stability of Network

TL;DR

This paper investigates how Multipath TCP affects network stability across different environments, revealing minor impacts on Internet and wireless networks but significant stability issues in data center networks due to bursty traffic patterns.

Contribution

It provides a comparative analysis of Multipath TCP's impact on network stability in Internet, data center, and wireless networks, highlighting specific vulnerabilities.

Findings

Stability is slightly affected in Internet and wireless networks.

Data center networks experience serious stability issues.

Traffic pattern differences influence stability impacts.

Abstract

Multipath-TCP receives a lot of attention recently and can potentially improve quality of service for both private and commercial users. It leverages the multiple available paths and send packets through all the available paths. The growing of Mutipath TCP has received a growing interest from both researchers who publish a growing number of articles on the topic and the vendors since Apple has decided to use Multipath TCP on its smartphones and tablets to support the Siri voice recognition application. In this paper, we study the performance of Multipath TCP from its impact on the stability of the network. In particular, we study three scenarios, Internet, which is the largest networks and involves heterogeneous traffic, data center, which is smaller but has different traffic patterns compared with Internet scale network and wireless network, whose energy consumption also needs to be considered. Our study shows that stability is affected but not seriouly for Internet and wireless network, but datacenter network stability is seriously affected due to its bursty traffic pattern.