Multi-path TCP invited at Google

MPTCP (Multipath TCP) is an extension of TCP to handle multiple paths between two endpoints. An IETF working group has recently been created to specify a multipath protocol for the transport layer.
MPTCP is designed with three major goals:

1. Improve throughput: the performance of a multipat how should be at least as good as this of a single path how on the best route.
2. Do no harm: a multi-path how should not take up any more capacity on any one of its paths than a single path how using that route.
3. Balance congestion: a multi-path how should move as much tra c as possible away from the most congested paths.

Costin Raiciu one of people working in MPTCP at its early age, along with Christoph Paasch who is part of the team who made a Linux kernel patch for using MPTCP, they made a Google Talk for presenting MPTCP, the motivation behind, the design of this communication protocol and  its congestion control.

A project was made on NS-3 simulator for enabling researchers to study the behaviour of MPCTP transport protocol in different scenarios. Here is a link to the Google project hosting the MPCTP code. Also an active discussion group can be found here.

For further reading, here is a list of some publications on MPCTP:

• Control of multipath TCP and optimization of multipath routing in the Internet, Damon Wischik, Mark Handley and Costin Raiciu, Proc. NetCOOP 2009.
• Bachir Chihani, Denis Collange, "A Multipath TCP model for ns-3 simulator," Accepted for publication in Workshop on ns-3 held in conjunction with SIMUTools 2011, Barcelona, Spain 2011.