MPTCP Experiences in the NorNet Testbed

TCP: Transmission Control Protocol MPTCP: Multi-Path TCP

The Multi-Path TCP (MPTCP) extension for the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) has been defined in , , , , . There are also detailed introductions provided for example by , as well as lots of further information material on . MPTCP is therefore not introduced in more detail here.

The scope of this document is to collect some experiences with the usage of MPTCP in the NorNet testbed, a large-scale Internet testbed for multi-homed systems.

The NorNet testbed (https://www.nntb.no) introduced in , is a programmable testbed platform with focus on the evaluation of multi-homed systems. It consists of programmable nodes that are distributed all over Norway as well as further locations in other countries. NotNet is built and operated by the Simula Research Laboratory and financed by Forskningsrådet (the Research Council of Norway) through their INFRASTRUKTUR program (project number 208798/F50). NorNet has two main components: NorNet Core and NorNet Edge. NorNet Core consists of currently 20 programmable sites (https://www.nntb.no/pub/nornet-configuration/NorNetCore-Sites.html), most of them multi-homed to several network providers. Details can be found in , , and . NorNet Edge consists of several hundreds of smaller nodes connected to all mobile broadband providers in Norway (http://robustenett.no/map), details can be found in . Together, these two components offer a unique platform for experimental networking research. NorNet is made available to the international networking research community. Further details on NorNet can be found on the NorNet website .

The NorNet nodes are Linux-based and therefore run the Linux MPTCP implementation by Université catholique de Louvain-la-Neuve (see ). With support by all NorNet Core nodes (circa 100 nodes at currently 20 sites) and most NorNet Edge nodes (several hundreds), NorNet probably provides the world’s largest MPTCP experimentation platform.

NetPerfMeter , is a network performance meter for the UDP, TCP, MPTCP, SCTP and DCCP transport protocols over IPv4 and IPv6. It simultaneously transmits bidirectional flows to an endpoint and measures the resulting flow bandwidths and QoS. The results are written as vector and scalar files. NetPerfMeter is provided in NorNet to allow for transport protocol comparisons and transport protocol performance evaluations.

So far, work has been done on evaluating MPTCP in the real-world Internet. The following list is a short overview of current research: examines the different properties of 3G paths (UMTS as well as CDMA2000) in NorNet Edge. These results provide an overview of the QoS characteristics that can be expected by multi-path transport protocols (and particularly by MPTCP) on different paths. analyzes the impact of buffer bloat on MPTCP connections over mobile broadband (2G, 3G) and WLAN paths. Furthermore, it proposes and evaluates Multi-Path Transport Bufferbloat Mitigation (MPT-BM), a bufferbloat mitigation algorithm to improve MPTCP performance in buffer-bloated wireless networks. examines the performance benefits of multi-path transport with MPTCP under heterogeneous wireless networks. It furthermore introduces and evaluates the Dynamic Relative Path Scoring (DRePaS) algorithm that optimizes the path management in such setups. examines the performance benefits of the state-of-the-art Linux MPTCP implementation in a large-scale NorNet setup, covering sites in multiple countries on different continents. It particularly also shortly introduces the NetPerfMeter measurement tool that is used to perform the measurements, and particularly its extension for MPTCP. examines how the IPv4/IPv6 identity duality can be utilized with MPTCP in order to improve performance even in case of only a single ISP connection.

Security considerations on MPTCP are described in .

This document has no actions for IANA.

The authors would like to thank Hakim Adhari and Fu Fa for discussions and support.