Multi-Path TCP: A Joint Congestion Control and Routing Scheme to Exploit Path Diversity in the Internet

We consider the problem of congestion-aware multi-path routing in the Internet. Currently, Internet routing protocols select only a single path between a source and a destination. However, due to many policy routing decisions, single-path routing may limit the achievable throughput. In this paper, we envision a scenario where multi-path routing is enabled in the Internet to take advantage of path diversity. Using minimal congestion feedback signals from the routers, we present a class of algorithms that can be implemented at the sources to stably and optimally split the flow between each source-destination pair. We then show that the connection-level throughput region of such multi-path routing/congestion control algorithms can be larger than that of a single-path congestion control scheme.