Multipath TCP for Short Flows Supported by SDN in Heterogeneous Networks
Ahmad Abumihsan, Abdalkarim Awad, Mohammad K. Jubran, Aziz M. Qaroush, Iyad Tumar, Abdullah Soliman Alshra’a · 2023
Multipath TCP (MPTCP) offers better performance, throughput, and resilience in connection failure cases by dividing the flow into multiple subflows and submitting them over many paths. Generally, MPTCP has a perfect impact on long flows in terms of throughput once transferring data with big sizes. However, MPTCP may degrade the efficiency of short flows, which are sensitive to latency (e.g., web transfer applications). This work investigates the impact of MPTCP on short flows in homogeneous and heterogeneous networks and confirms that a bandwidth gap between paths is a critical factor influencing the performance of the short flows. Therefore, the work uses Software-Defined Networking (SDN) architecture to address the MPTCP problems and improves its performance for short flows. Our performance results show an improvement in MPTCP performance for short flows compared to the disjoint approach.