Is two greater than one?: Analyzing Multipath TCP over Dual-LTE in the Wild

TL;DR

This paper investigates the performance of Multipath TCP over dual-LTE connections in real-world mobile scenarios, revealing challenges at high speeds and the influence of traffic patterns and congestion control.

Contribution

It provides the first extensive in-the-wild measurement study of dual-LTE MPTCP, analyzing its behavior under mobility and diverse network conditions.

Findings

MPTCP performance drops at high mobility speeds due to signal drops and handovers.

Frequent LTE path changes lead to sub-optimal subflow utilization.

Application patterns and congestion control variants significantly affect MPTCP adaptability.

Abstract

Multipath TCP (MPTCP) is a standardized TCP extension which allows end-hosts to simultaneously exploit all of their network interfaces. The recent proliferation of dual-SIM mobile phones makes multi-LTE MPTCP setup an attractive option. We perform extensive measurements of MPTCP over two LTE connections in low and high-speed mobility scenarios over five months, both in controlled and in-the-wild environments. Our findings indicate that MPTCP performance decreases at high speeds due to increased frequency of signal strength drops and handovers. Both LTE paths experience frequent changes which result in a sub-optimal subflow utilization. We also find that while path changes are unpredictable, their impact on MPTCP follows a deterministic trend. Finally, we show that both application traffic patterns and congestion control variants impact MPTCP adaptability at high speeds.