Survey of Transport Layer Multihoming Protocols and Performance Analysis of MPTCP

Today’s handheld devices like laptops, smart-phones, etc., are termed as multihomed devices as they are equipped with more than one active network interface like Ethernet, 3G, and Wi-Fi. The ability of multihoming can increase network throughput, fault recovery capabilities, and share network traffic among available paths to balance the load. However, conventional transport layer protocols like TCP were not designed to support multihoming ability. This paper explores prominent multihoming solutions suggested at the transport layer and analyzes the performance of TCP’s multihoming extension MultiPath TCP under heterogeneous multiple sub-flows. The prime objective of this study is to find out the suitability of MultiPath TCP in scenarios where multihomed devices are using homogeneous or heterogeneous network interfaces assuming that an MPTCP-enabled client is connected to an MPTCP enabled server using two network interfaces. Two different topologies namely bottleneck and no-bottleneck are used to investigate the behavior of MPTCP in critical conditions like of bottleneck.