A multipath TCP (MPTCP) is a promising protocol that has been standardized by the Internet Engineering Task Force to support multipath operations in the transport layer. However, although the MPTCP can provide multiple transmission paths and aggregate the bandwidth of multiple paths, it does not consistently achieve more throughput (goodput) nor a greater connection resilience. Currently, the MPTCP is vulnerable to path failure or underperforming subflows, which cause transmission interruption or throughput (goodput) degradation. Unfortunately, there is no exact rule for declaring a path failure or preventing the usage of underperforming subflows in the MPTCP. In this paper, we propose a novel path failure detection method referred to as feedback-based path failure (FPF) detection. In addition, we propose a new decision method called buffer blocking protection (BBP) to address the underperforming subflows for the MPTCP. Measurement results indicate that the FPF detection reduces transmission interruption time by the fast path failure decision, which can prevent duplicate transmission interruption events and unnecessary retransmissions. Furthermore, the FPF detection is sufficiently robust in terms of packet loss and the delay difference between paths. The results additionally show that the BBP method prevents goodput degradation due to underperforming subflows. Consequently, the MPTCP with the BBP method can at least achieve the throughput performance of a single Transmission Control Protocol (TCP), which uses the best path regardless of the delay difference between paths.Index Terms-Multipath Transmission Control Protocol, path failure detection, buffer blocking problem.
Software-Defined Networking (SDN) is a promising paradigm of computer networks, offering a programmable and centralised network architecture. However, although such a technology supports the ability to dynamically handle network traffic based on real-time and flexible traffic control, SDN-based networks can be vulnerable to dynamic change of flow control rules, which causes transmission disruption and packet loss in SDN hardware switches. This problem can be critical because the interruption and packet loss in SDN switches can bring additional performance degradation for SDN-controlled traffic flows in the data plane. In this paper, we propose a novel robust flow control mechanism referred to as Priority-based Flow Control (PFC) for dynamic but disruption-free flow management when it is necessary to change flow control rules on the fly. PFC minimizes the complexity of flow modification process in SDN switches by temporarily adapting the priority of flow rules in order to substantially reduce the time spent on control-plane processing during run-time. Measurement results show that PFC is able to successfully prevent transmission disruption and packet loss events caused by traffic path changes, thus offering dynamic and lossless traffic control for SDN switches.
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