Benefit of Multipath TCP on the Stability of Network

Abstract: Multipath-TCP receives a lot of attention recently and can potentially improve quality of service for both private and commercial users. It leverages the multiple available paths and send packets through all the available paths. The growing of Mutipath TCP has received a growing interest from both researchers who publish a growing number of articles on the topic and the vendors since Apple has decided to use Multipath TCP on its smartphones and tablets to support the Siri voice recognition application. In this paper, we study the performance of Multipath TCP from its impact on the stability of the network. In particular, we study three scenarios, Internet, which is the largest networks and involves heterogeneous traffic, data center, which is smaller but has different traffic patterns compared with Internet scale network and wireless network, whose energy consumption also needs to be considered. Our study shows that stability is affected but not seriouly for Internet and wireless network, but datacenter network stability is seriously affected due to its bursty traffic pattern.