An In-depth Understanding Of Multipath TCP On Mobile Devices: Measurement And System Design

Abstract

Today's mobile devices are usually equipped with multiple wireless network interfaces that provide new opportunities for improving application performance. In this paper, we conduct an in-depth study of multipath for mobile settings, focusing on MPTCP, with the goal of developing key insights for evolving the mobile multipath design. First, we conduct to our knowledge the most in-depth and the longest user trial of mobile multipath that focuses not only on MPTCP performance, but also on cross-layer interactions. Second, we identify a new research problem of multipath-aware CDN server selection. We demonstrate its real-world importance and provide recommendations. Third, our measurement findings lead us to design and implement a flexible software architecture for mobile multipath called MPFlex, which strategically employs multiplexing to improve multipath performance (by up to 63% for short-lived flows). MPFlex decouples the high-level scheduling algorithm and the low-level OS protocol implementation, and enables developers to flexibly plug-in new multipath features. MPFlex also provides an ideal vantage point for flexibly realizing user-specified multipath policies and is friendly to middleboxes.