Transparent Multipath: Using Double MPTCP Proxies to Enhance Transport Performance for Traditional TCP

Multipath TCP (MPTCP) proxy is a way to provide multipath transmissions for current Internet hosts. However, previous works on MPTCP mainly focus on the scenario where one end of the connection is MPTCP-capable, which is not the case in current networks. In this article, we propose a transparent MPTCP (T-MPTCP) transmission scheme to achieve MPTCP transmission for TCP hosts at both ends. Specifically, T-MPTCP contains two components in the network: an aggregation box at the user side acting as an implicit proxy, and an aggregation server at the server side acting as an explicit proxy. The aggregation server can be deployed in different places of the network for optimized performance, and we thus propose a Proxy Location Selected (PLS) algorithm to determine the best aggregation server placement. To validate our design, T-MPTCP is deployed in a real network for experiments, whose results exhibit higher network throughput under T-MPTCP and further improvement with the PLS algorithm.