Towards a Context Aware Multipath-TCP

Multi-homing has become ubiquitous in the mobile domain. Despite this, mobile devices are not yet capable of fully realizing the potential of the increasing variety and availability of network resources. Multipath-TCP (MPTCP) is one of the most prominent technologies for multi-homed mobile devices, that is able to effectively tackle both resource pooling and mobility. Despite the success of MPTCP we believe that the implementation can be enhanced for the mobile domain, by increasing the granularity of control a device has over how its network interfaces are used. In this paper we present and evaluate MPTCP - Context Aware (MPTCP-CA), which introduces a policy oriented approach to the management and control of MPTCP connections. Our evaluation demonstrates three use cases that leverage context awareness to improve the utilization of multiple network interfaces with respect to the users requirements.