Feedback-Based Path Failure Detection and Buffer Blocking Protection for MPTCP

Abstract

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.

Towards Adaptive Multipath Managing: A Lightweight Path Management Mechanism to Aid Multihomed Mobile Computing Devices

“…This path management mechanism was devoted to possibly reducing the out-of-order packet arrival problem and alleviating receive buffer blocking in MPTCP based multipath transmission. Oh et al [22] proposed a feedback based path failure detection and buffer blocking protection approach for MPTCP. This approach aimed to (i) prevent the usage of underperforming sub-flows in the MPTCP, by using a path failure detection method, and (ii) prevent goodput degradation due to delay differences between paths, by detecting buffer blocking and closing underperforming sub-flows.…”

“…Because of this, the out-of-order data arrival will be an inevitable phenomenon in multipath transmission. What is worse, large numbers of out-of-order packets buffered in the constrained receiver buffer will result in the "hot-potato" receiver buffer blocking problem and thereby cause serious throughput performance degradations [22].…”

A Mathematical Model for Efficient and Fair Resource Assignment in Multipath Transport

“…In other words, an MPTCP user should not get an advantage by deploying multiple subflows on the same link. Practical methods based on coupling the congestion window sizes of individual subflows [22] as well as feedback-based path failure (FPF) or buffer blocking protection (BBP) [23] have been proposed to ensure that an MPTCP flow gets at least the same share as a legacy TCP flow and avoid (sub) flows being underutilized.…”

(PU)2M2: A potentially underperforming‐aware path usage management mechanism for secure MPTCP‐based multipathing services

“…When there are a great number of O 3 packets held by the constrained receiver buffer, MPTCP will experience severe receiver buffer blocking (RB 2 LOC) problem. 10 Recently, many MPTCP studies have concentrated their efforts on the packet reordering and RB 2 LOC issues [11][12][13][14][15][16] ; however, to the best of our knowledge, the current researches mostly utilize the regular TCP operations to detect a failure-prone path or an underperforming path.…”

“…10 Recently, many MPTCP studies have concentrated their efforts on the packet reordering and RB 2 LOC issues [11][12][13][14][15][16] ; however, to the best of our knowledge, the current researches mostly utilize the regular TCP operations to detect a failure-prone path or an underperforming path. Unfortunately, the standard MPTCP scheduler allocates traffic over all available paths, without considering that asymmetric paths with different delay characteristics may lead to the out-of-order (O 3 ) packet arrival problem.…”