A Comprehensive Evaluation of Different Approaches to Tunnelling over Multiple Paths

Abstract

Multipath Tunnelling (MT) is an effective approach to increase the reliability and throughput of network connections. In contrast to Multipath TCP (MPTCP) or SCTP, it also works for UDP traffic and its deployment is easy. It requires neither full access to all uplink endpoints nor a multipath protocol implementation in every host. Despite its potential, research on MT is sparse. In this paper we provide a comprehensive Evaluation of several state-of-the-art MT approaches and compare them to Tunnelling-over-MPTCP. In several experiments we compare throughput for reliable traffic as well as jitter for unreliable throughput. We find that HTMT (High Throughput Multipath Tunnelling, a specific MT approach) delivers comparable jitter with a considerably higher throughput for different path configurations.