Multipath IP Routing on End Devices: Motivation, Design, and Performance

Most end devices are now equipped with multiple network interfaces. Applications can exploit all available interfaces and benefit from multipath transmission. Recently Multipath TCP (MPTCP) was proposed to implement multipath transmission at the transport layer and has attracted lots of attention from academia and industry. However, MPTCP only supports TCP-based applications and its multipath routing flexibility is limited. In this paper, we investigate the possibility of orchestrating multipath transmission from the network layer of end devices, and develop a Multipath IP (MPIP) design consisting of signaling, session and path management, multipath routing, and NAT traversal. We implement MPIP in Linux and Android kernels. Through controlled lab experiments and Internet experiments, we demonstrate that MPIP can effectively achieve multipath gains at the network layer. It not only supports the legacy TCP and UDP protocols, but also works seamlessly with MPTCP. By facilitating user-defined customized routing, MPIP can route traffic from competing applications in a coordinated fashion to maximize the aggregate user Quality-of-Experience.