A Transport Layer Approach for Improving End-to-End Performance and Robustness Using Redundant Paths

Recent work on Internet measurement and overlay networks has shown that redundant paths are common between pairs of hosts and that one can often achieve better end-to-end performance by adaptively choosing an alternate path. In this paper, the authors propose an end-to-end transport layer protocol, mTCP, which can aggregate the available bandwidth of those redundant paths in parallel. By striping one flow's packets across multiple paths, mTCP can not only obtain higher end-to-end throughput but also be more robust under path failures. When some paths fail, mTCP can continue sending packets on other paths, and the recovery process normally takes only a few seconds.