Observing real smartphone applications over multipath TCP

A large fraction of smartphones have both cellular and WiFi interfaces. Despite this, smartphones rarely use them simultaneously because most of their data traffic is controlled by TCP, which can only use one interface at a time. Multipath TCP is a recently standardized TCP extension that solves this problem. Smartphone vendors have started to deploy Multipath TCP, but its performance with real smartphone applications has not been studied in detail yet. To fill this gap, we port Multipath TCP on Android smartphones, and propose a framework to analyze the interactions between real network-heavy applications and this new protocol. We use eight popular Android applications and analyze their usage of the WiFi and cellular networks (especially 4G/LTE).