Virtualizing and Deploying a Solution to MP-TCP’s Shared Bottlenecks as a Network Function

Abstract

Network functions virtualization (NFV) offers an alternative way to design, deploy, and manage networking services. This paper presents the implementation and deployment of a virtualized network function to solve MP-TCP’ shared bottlenecks problem. MP-TCP (MultiPath-TCP) is a protocol that allows hosts that have several interfaces to send data through multiple paths in the network. An MP-TCP connection is divided into several TCP connections called subflows that may follow different paths, in this way effective connection rates and resilience can be increased. However, in a scenario where MP-TCP is used with hosts having a single network interface, created subflows follow the same path even if several are available; this generates the problem known as a shared bottleneck. A solution to this problem is implemented as a SDN (Software Defined Networking) module that is integrated into OpenDayLight’s framework which is used as the SDN controller. This solution is then deployed as a NFV over a cloud infrastructure implemented with OpenStack over a high-end physical server. The deployment of the NFV is automated to a certain degree using Ansible, a DevOps tool. Finally, results of the tests of the SDN solution to MP-TCP’s shared bottlenecks and its operation as a NFV using a completely virtualized network are reported.