MPTCP is not pareto-optimal
Ramin Khalili, Nicolas Gast, Miroslav V. Popovic, Utkarsh Upadhyay, Jean‐Yves Le Boudec · 2012
MPTCP has been proposed recently as a mechanism for supporting transparently multiple connections to the application layer. It is under discussion at the IETF. We show, however, that the current MPTCP suffers from two problems: (P1) Upgrading some TCP users to MPTCP can reduce the throughput of others without any benefit to the upgraded users, which is a symptom of not being Pareto-optimal; and (P2) MPTCP users could be excessively aggressive towards TCP users. We attribute these problems to the linked-increases algorithm (LIA) of MPTCP and, more specifically, to an excessive amount of traffic transmitted over congested paths.