Experimental evaluation of multipath TCP schedulers

Abstract

Today many end hosts are equipped with multiple interfaces. These interfaces can be utilized simultaneously by multipath protocols to pool resources of the links in an efficient way while also providing resilience to eventual link failures. However how to schedule the data segments over multiple links is a challenging problem, and highly influences the performance of multipath protocols. In this paper, we focus on different schedulers for Multipath TCP. We first design and implement a generic modular scheduler framework that enables testing of different schedulers for Multipath TCP. We then use this framework to do an in-depth analysis of different schedulers by running emulated and real-world experiments on a testbed. We consider bulk data transfer as well as application limited traffic and identify metrics to quantify the scheduler's performance. Our results shed light on how scheduling decisions can help to improve multipath transfer.