Multi-Stream TCP: Leveraging the Performance of a Per-Packet Multipath Routing Algorithm When Using TCP and SDN
Noel Farrugia, Victor Buttigieg, Johann A. Briffa · 2019
Multipath routing is required to make efficient use of all the available network capacity. Per-packet multipath routing algorithms report better performance than their Per-flow counterparts. However, per-packet multipath routing algorithms are rarely used in practice due their negative impact on connection oriented protocols, such as TCP. To overcome this problem we are proposing the Multi-Stream TCP (MSTCP) protocol. MSTCP gives applications that use TCP access to the performance improvements made possible by per-packet multipath routing. An improvement of up to 70% and 40% in the application's goodput on a butterfly network is reported when using MSTCP compared to OSPF and our previous per-packet multipath routing solution, respectively.