Feedback-Based Path Failure Detection and Buffer Blocking Protection for MPTCP

Bong Hwan Oh, Jaiyong Lee*

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

32 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

A multipath TCP (MPTCP) is a promising protocol that has been standardized by the Internet Engineering Task Force to support multipath operations in the transport layer. However, although the MPTCP can provide multiple transmission paths and aggregate the bandwidth of multiple paths, it does not consistently achieve more throughput (goodput) nor a greater connection resilience. Currently, the MPTCP is vulnerable to path failure or underperforming subflows, which cause transmission interruption or throughput (goodput) degradation. Unfortunately, there is no exact rule for declaring a path failure or preventing the usage of underperforming subflows in the MPTCP. In this paper, we propose a novel path failure detection method referred to as feedback-based path failure (FPF) detection. In addition, we propose a new decision method called buffer blocking protection (BBP) to address the underperforming subflows for the MPTCP. Measurement results indicate that the FPF detection reduces transmission interruption time by the fast path failure decision, which can prevent duplicate transmission interruption events and unnecessary retransmissions. Furthermore, the FPF detection is sufficiently robust in terms of packet loss and the delay difference between paths. The results additionally show that the BBP method prevents goodput degradation due to underperforming subflows. Consequently, the MPTCP with the BBP method can at least achieve the throughput performance of a single Transmission Control Protocol (TCP), which uses the best path regardless of the delay difference between paths.

Original languageEnglish
Article number7423793
Pages (from-to)3450-3461
Number of pages12
JournalIEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking
Volume24
Issue number6
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Dec 2016
Externally publishedYes

Keywords

  • Multipath Transmission Control Protocol
  • buffer blocking problem
  • path failure detection

Cite this