Gregory Detal

Exploring mobile/WiFi handover with multipath TCP

Mobile Operators see an unending growth of data traffic generated by their customers on their mobile data networks. As the operators start to have a hard time carrying all this traffic over 3G or 4G networks, offloading to WiFi is being considered. Multipath TCP (MPTCP) is an evolution of TCP that allows the simultaneous use of multiple interfaces for a single connection while still presenting a standard TCP socket API to the application. The protocol specification of Multipath TCP has foreseen the different building blocks to allow transparent handover from WiFi to 3G back and forth. In this paper we experimentally prove the feasibility of using MPTCP for mobile/WiFi handover in the current Internet. Our experiments run over real WiFi/3G networks and use our Linux kernel implementation of MPTCP that we enhanced to better support handover. We analyze MPTCPs energy consumption and handover performance in various operational modes. We find that MPTCP enables smooth handovers offering reasonable performance even for very demanding applications such as VoIP. Finally, our experiments showed that lost MPTCP control signals can adversely affect handover performance; we implement and test a simple but effective solution to this issue.

Revealing middlebox interference with tracebox

Middleboxes such as firewalls, NAT, proxies, or Deep Packet Inspection play an increasingly important role in various types of IP networks, including enterprise and cellular networks. Recent studies have shed the light on their impact on real traffic and the complexity of managing them. Network operators and researchers have few tools to understand the impact of those boxes on any path. In this paper, we propose tracebox, an extension to the widely used traceroute tool, that is capable of detecting various types of middlebox interference over almost any path. tracebox sends IP packets containing TCP segments with different TTL values and analyses the packet encapsulated in the returned ICMP messages. Further, as recent routers quote, in the ICMP message, the entire IP packet that they received, tracebox is able to detect any modification performed by upstream middleboxes. In addition, tracebox can often pinpoint the network hop where the middlebox interference occurs. We evaluate tracebox with measurements performed on PlanetLab nodes. Our analysis reveals various types of middleboxes that were not expected on such an experimental testbed supposed to be connected to the Internet without any restriction.

Are TCP extensions middlebox-proof?

Besides the traditional routers and switches, middleboxes such as NATs, firewalls, IDS or proxies have a growing importance in many networks, notably in entreprise and wireless access networks. Many of these middleboxes modify the packets that they process. For this, they to implement (a subset of) protocols like TCP. Despite the deployment of these middleboxes, TCP continues to evolve on the endhosts and little is known about the interactions between TCP extensions and the middleboxes. In this paper, we experimentally evaluate the interference between middleboxes and the Linux TCP stack. For this, we first propose MBtest, a set of Click elements that model middlebox behavior. We use it to experimentally evaluate how three TCP extensions interact with middleboxes. We also analyzes measurements of the interference between Multipath TCP and middleboxes in fifty different networks.

Multipath in the middle(box)

Multipath TCP (MPTCP) is a major modification to TCP that enables a single transport connection to use multiple paths. Smartphones can benefit from MPTCP by using both WiFi and 3G/4G interfaces for their data-traffic, potentially improving the performance and allowing mobility through vertical handover. However, MPTCP requires a modification of the end hosts, thus suffers from the chicken-and-egg deployment problem. A global deployment of MPTCP is therefore expected to take years. To increase the incentives for clients and servers to upgrade their system, we propose MiMBox an efficient protocol converter that can translate MPTCP into TCP and vice versa to provide multipath benefits to early adopters of MPTCP. MiMBox is application agnostic and can be used transparently or explicitly. Moreover, a close attention was paid to the implementations design to achieve good forwarding performance. MiMBox is implemented entirely in the Linux kernel so that it is able to more easily circumvent the bottlenecks of a user-space implementation. Measurements show that we always outperform user-space solutions and that the performance is close to plain IP packet forwarding.

SWISH: Secure WiFi sharing

The fast increase of mobile Internet use motivates the need for WiFi sharing solutions, where a mobile user connects to the Internet via a nearby foreign network while its home network is far away. This situation creates security challenges which are only partially solved by existing solutions like VPNs. Such solutions neglect the security of the visited network, and private users or organizations are thus reluctant to share their connection. In this paper, we present and implement SWISH, an efficient, full scale solution to this problem. SWISH is based on establishing a tunnel from the visited network to the users home network. All the data from the mobile is then forwarded through this tunnel. Internet access is therefore provided without endangering the visited network. We also propose protocol extensions that allow the visited network to charge for the data it forwards, and to protect the privacy of the mobile user while preventing abuse. SWISH was successfully deployed on university networks, demonstrating that it can be conveniently implemented in existing networks with a minimal impact on performance.

SMAPP: towards smart multipath TCP-enabled applications

Multipath TCP was designed and implemented as a backward compatible replacement for TCP. For this reason, it exposes the standard socket API to the applications that cannot control the utilisation of the different paths. This is a key feature for applications that are unaware of the multipath nature of the network. On the contrary, this is a limitation for applications that could benefit from specific knowledge to use multiple paths in a way that fits their needs. As the specific knowledge of an application can not be known in advance, we propose a Multipath TCP path manager that delegates the management of the paths to the applications. This path manager enables applications to control how the different paths are used to transfer data. We implement this path manager above the Linux Multipath TCP kernel. It is composed of a kernel part that exposes events and commands to an userspace application that controls the key functions of Multipath TCP such as the creation/suppression of subflows or reactions to retransmissions. We demonstrate the benefits of this path manager on different use cases.

Revisiting flow-based load balancing: Stateless path selection in data center networks

Hash-based load-balancing techniques are widely used to distribute the load over multiple forwarding paths and preserve the packet sequence of transport-level flows. Forcing a long-lived, i.e., elephant, flow to follow a specific path in the network is a desired mechanism in data center networks to avoid crossing hot spots. This limits the formation of bottlenecks and so improves the network use. Unfortunately, current per-flow load-balancing methods do not allow sources to deterministically force a specific path for a flow. In this paper, we propose a deterministic approach enabling end hosts to steer their flows over any desired load-balanced path without relying on any packet header extension. By using an invertible mechanism instead of solely relying on a hash function in routers, our method allows to easily select the packets header field values in order to force the selection of a given load-balanced path without storing any state in routers. We perform various simulations and experiments to evaluate the performance and prove the feasibility of our method using a Linux kernel implementation. Furthermore, we demonstrate with simulations and lab experiments how MultiPath TCP can benefit from the combination of our solution with a flow scheduling system that efficiently distributes elephant flows in large data center networks.

Revisiting next-hop selection in multipath networks

Multipath routing strategies such as Equal-Cost MultiPath (ECMP) are widely used in IP and data-center networks. Most current methods to balance packets over the multiple next hops toward the destination base their decision on a hash computed over selected fields of the packet headers. Because of the non-invertible nature of hash functions, it is hard to determine the values of those fields so as to make the packet follow a specific path in the network. However, several applications might benefit from being able to choose such a path. Therefore, we propose a novel next-hop selection method based on an invertible function. By encoding the selection of successive routers into common fields of packet headers, the proposed method enables end hosts to force their packets to follow a specific path.