A Study on Performance Evaluation of Multipath TCP Implementations
Kien Trung Nguyen, Mirza Golam Kibria, Kentaro Ishizu, Fumihide Kojima · 2017
Multipath TCP (MPTCP) enables concurrent data transmissions over multiple wireless links aiming to achieve bandwidth aggregation and resilience enhancement. MPTCP is considerably software-based, hence it is expectedly evolved and emerged in the current and next generations of mobile wireless networks. The canonical and most important use case of MPTCP in mobile wireless is the scenario, in which a mobile device installed MPTCP uses two wireless links (i.e., LTE and Wi-Fi) for data transferring with an application sever. In this paper, we conduct a study of MPTCP performance in the such scenario, focusing on state-of-the-art implementations (i.e., balia, olia, lia, wvegas). First, we investigate the backward compatibility of MPTCP implementations in a single-path environment. The results show that wvegas is not well fit, while the others are compatible. Secondly, we evaluate the effects of Wi-Fi or LTE selection for the MPTCP first subflow's initialization on the overall performance. While the handshaking time is similar for all the MPTCPs, the throughput is largely different. Besides, the network selection largely causes the variation of MPTCP throughput (i.e., the throughput with Wi-Fi selection is more than 200% the one with LTE selection in the case of olia).