Member-only story
MultiPath TCP VM and Network Function Virtualization
Introduction
Many networking devices such as smartphones have multiple networking connections such as WiFi, and 4G LTE radio. The RFC 6824 defines the MultiPath TCP (MPTCP) protocol that can enable two MPTCP enabled devices to use their available wireline and/or wireless networking transports to increase the overall TCP throughput between the two devices by dividing a single stream of TCP traffic into many MPTCP subflows over the available networking transports. The destination MPTCP device will then merge the MPTCP subflows back into a single stream of TCP traffic before forwarding the TCP traffic to the application and vice versa. Beside TCP throughput improvement, the use of multiple networking transports in the MPTCP can also improve network resilience between the two TCP devices. While more than 80% of Internet traffic is TCP based, MPTCP has not been very popular due to the fact that most servers on the Internet do not support MPTCP. This situation is changing with the support by carriers for the Draft RFC Extensions for Network-Assisted MP-TCP Deployment Models. In a nutshell, the Draft RFC defines a Hybrid Access Gateway (HAG) or MPTCP concentrator in the network to proxy MPTCP traffic for the Internet servers.
The following shows an example of a MPTCP enabled resident broadband deployment where a hybrid…
