A Multipath TCP model for ns-3 simulator

We present an implementation of Multipath TCP (MPTCP) under the NS-3 open source network simulator. MPTCP is a promising extension of TCP currently considered by the recent eponymous IETF working group, with the objective of improving the performance of TCP, especially its robustness to variable network conditions. We describe this new protocol, its main functions and our implementation in NS-3. Besides this implementation compliant to the current versions of the IETF drafts, we have also added and compared various packet reordering mechanisms. We indeed notice that such mechanisms highly improve the performance of MPTCP. We believe that our implementation could be useful for future works in MPTCP performance evaluation, especially to compare packet reordering algorithms or coupling congestion control mechanisms between subfows.

[1]  Ming Zhang,et al.  Proceedings of the General Track: 2004 USENIX Annual Technical Conference , 2022 .

[2]  Brian D. Noble,et al.  The end-to-end performance effects of parallel TCP sockets on a lossy wide-area network , 2002, Proceedings 16th International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium.

[3]  Jian Wang,et al.  Concurrency Handling in TCP , 2007, Fifth Annual Conference on Communication Networks and Services Research (CNSR '07).

[4]  Mark Handley,et al.  TCP Extensions for Multipath Operation with Multiple Addresses , 2020, RFC.

[5]  Kultida Rojviboonchai,et al.  An Evaluation of Multi-path Transmission Control Protocol (M/TCP) with Robust Acknowledgement Schemes (インターネットコンファレンス2002論文集) , 2004 .

[6]  Randy H. Katz,et al.  The Eifel algorithm: making TCP robust against spurious retransmissions , 2000, CCRV.

[7]  Lyndon Ong,et al.  An Introduction to the Stream Control Transmission Protocol (SCTP) , 2002, RFC.

[8]  Kazunori Yamamoto,et al.  Forward RTO-Recovery ( F-RTO ) : An Algorithm for Detecting Spurious Retransmission Timeouts with TCP , 2005 .

[9]  Dilip Sarkar A Concurrent Multipath TCP and Its Markov Model , 2006, 2006 IEEE International Conference on Communications.

[10]  C. Raiciu,et al.  Practical Congestion Control for Multipath Transport Prot ocols , 2009 .

[11]  Mark Handley,et al.  The resource pooling principle , 2008, CCRV.

[12]  Victor O. K. Li,et al.  An Overview of Packet Reordering in Transmission Control Protocol (TCP): Problems, Solutions, and Challenges , 2007, IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems.

[13]  Reiner Ludwig,et al.  The Eifel Detection Algorithm for TCP , 2003, RFC.

[14]  Sally Floyd,et al.  An Extension to the Selective Acknowledgement (SACK) Option for TCP , 2000, RFC.

[15]  Tutomu Murase,et al.  Improved data distribution for multipath TCP communication , 2005, GLOBECOM '05. IEEE Global Telecommunications Conference, 2005..

[16]  Mark Handley,et al.  Coupled Multipath-Aware Congestion Control , 2010 .