Thomas Dreibholz

On the Use of Concurrent Multipath Transfer over Asymmetric Paths

With the deployment of more and more resilience-critical Internet applications, there is a rising demand for multi-homed network sites. This leads to the desire for simultaneously utilising all available access paths to improve application data throughput. This is commonly known as Concurrent Multipath Transfer (CMT); approaches for several Transport Layer protocols have been proposed. Combined with Resource Pooling~(RP), CMT can also fairly coexist with concurrent non-CMT flows. Current approaches focus on symmetric paths (i.e. similar bandwidth, delay and error rate). However, asymmetric paths are much more likely -- particularly for realistic Internet setups -- and efficient CMT usage on such paths is therefore crucial. In this paper, we first show the challenges of plain as well as RP-aware CMT data transport over asymmetric paths. After that, we introduce mechanisms for efficient transport over such paths. Finally, we analyse the performance of our approaches by using simulations.

Evaluation of Concurrent Multipath Transfer over Dissimilar Paths

The steadily growing deployment of resilience-critical Internet services is leading to an increasing number of Multi-Homed network sites. Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Lines (ADSL) are an inexpensive way to add a secondary Internet access connection. With the development of Multi-Path Transport Layer protocols - like Multipath TCP (MPTCP) and the Stream Control Transmission Protocol (SCTP) furnished by a Concurrent Multipath Transfer (CMT-SCTP) extension - there is also a strong interest in utilising all access connections simultaneously to improve the data throughput of the applications. However, combining network paths over ADSL with paths over other access technologies like fibre optic links implies highly dissimilar paths with significantly different bandwidths, delays and queuing behaviours. Efficient Multi-Path transport over such dissimilar paths is a challenging task for the new Transport Layer protocols under development. In this paper, we show the difficulties of Multi-Path transport in a real-world dissimilar path setup which consists of a high-speed fibre optic link and an ADSL connection. After that, we present an optimised buffer handling technique which solves the transport efficiency issues in this setup. Our optimisation is first analysed by simulations. Finally, we also show the usefulness of our approach by experimental evaluation in a real Multi-Homed Internet setup.

Stream control transmission protocol: Past, current, and future standardization activities

The Stream Control Transmission Protocol (SCTP) is a general-purpose transport layer protocol providing a service similar to TCP - plus a set of advanced features to utilize the enhanced capabilities of modern IP networks and to support increased application requirements. Nowadays, there are SCTP implementations for all major operating systems. While SCTP was standardized as an RFC several years ago, there is still significant ongoing work within the IETF to discuss and standardize further features in the form of protocol extensions. In this article, we first introduce the SCTP base protocol and already standardized extensions. After that, we focus on the ongoing SCTP standardization progress in the IETF and give an overview of activities and challenges in the areas of security and concurrent multipath transport.

On the fairness of transport protocols in a multi-path environment

Today, a steadily growing number of devices contains multiple network interfaces. For example, nearly all smartphones are equipped with at least W-LAN as well as 3G/4G interfaces. In consequence, there is a rising demand for so-called multi-path transfer, which utilizes all of these interfaces simultaneously in order to maximize the payload throughput of applications. Currently, this so-called multi-path transfer is very actively discussed by the IETF, in form of the Multi-Path TCP (MPTCP) extension for TCP as well as the Concurrent Multi-path Transfer extension for SCTP (CMT-SCTP). Their larger-scale deployment in the Internet is expected for the near future. A key issue that prevents the standardization of these approaches is the fairness to concurrent TCP flows. A multi-path transfer should behave “TCP-friendly”, i.e. cause no harm to the performance of the very widely deployed TCP-based applications. In this paper, we first extend the notion of “fairness” from single-path transport to multi-path transport. Furthermore, we introduce the relevant congestion control approaches in the IETF context for single-path as well as multi-path transfer. We simulatively analyze these approaches in a couple of interesting network configuration scenarios, in order to show their behavior with special regard to the fairness definitions. Particularly, we also point out items of further discussion which are the result of the current approaches.

A new scheme for IP-based Internet-mobility

In this contribution we present a new type of mobility management for IP-based networks that, contrary to conventional approaches, does not focus on the network layer, but on the transport and session layers. At the heart of this new mobility concept is the reliable transport protocol SCTP, with an enhancement for dynamic address reconfiguration. The reliable server pooling (RSerPool) protocol suite provides a service for session monitoring and control. The suggested solution is transparent for applications, requires no changes in the network infrastructure, and is evaluated with a real-world implementation. Finally, we present first results from the application of this mobility concept to different mobility scenarios. These were obtained from working SCTP and RSerPool implementations that have been developed within our group.

Multi-path transport over heterogeneous wireless networks: Does it really pay off?

Multi-path transfer protocols such as Concurrent Multi-Path Transfer for SCTP and Multi-Path TCP (MPTCP), are becoming increasingly popular, due to widespread deployment of smartphones with multi-homing support. Although the idea of using multiple interfaces simultaneously to improve application throughput is tempting, does transmission over multiple interfaces always provide benefits especially in realistic setup? In this paper, we first show that multi-path transfer might actually have a negative impact in real-world scenarios with mobile broadband and wireless LAN networks. We then introduce our Dynamic Relative Path Scoring (DRePaS) algorithm that continuously evaluates the contribution of paths to the overall performance and dynamically influences the scheduling decisions to make best use of the paths for the overall system performance. We show that DRePaS outperforms the current MPTCP implementation in terms of throughput and application delay, especially when the links are heterogeneous.

Applying TCP-Friendly Congestion Control to Concurrent Multipath Transfer

The steadily growing importance of Internet-based applications and their resilience requirements lead to a rising number of multi-homed sites. The idea of Concurrent Multipath Transfer (CMT) is to exploit the existence of multiple paths among endpoints to increase application data throughput. However, handling the congestion control of each path independently lacks of fairness against non-CMT flows. In this paper, we describe our approach of combining CMT with the idea of Resource Pooling (RP) in order to achieve a performance improvement over non-CMT transfer while still remaining fair to concurrent flows on congested links. Unlike existing approaches which adapt classic TCP to a multi-homed CMT protocol, our approach does not depend on specific characteristics of TCP. Instead, we base on already entrenched functional blocks of CMT transfer, on the example of the CMT-enabled SCTP (Stream Control Transmission Protocol). In a simulative proof-of-concept analysis, we show that our approach -- while relatively simple -- is already quite effective.

An efficient approach for state sharing in server pools

Many Internet services require high availability. Server pooling provides a high availability solution using redundant servers. If one server fails, the service is continued by another one. A challenge for server pooling is efficient state sharing: the new server requires the old ones state to continue service. This paper proposes a simple, efficient and scalable solution, usable for a large subset of applications.

NorNet Core - A multi-homed research testbed

Over the last decade, the Internet has grown at a tremendous speed in both size and complexity. Nowadays, a large number of important services - for instance e-commerce, healthcare and many others - depend on the availability of the underlying network. Clearly, service interruptions due to network problems may have a severe impact. On the long way towards the Future Internet, the complexity will grow even further. Therefore, new ideas and concepts must be evaluated thoroughly, and particularly in realistic, real-world Internet scenarios, before they can be deployed for production networks. For this purpose, various testbeds - for instance PlanetLab, GpENI or G-Lab - have been established and are intensively used for research. However, all of these testbeds lack the support for so-called multi-homing.Multi-homing denotes the connection of a site to multiple Internet service providers, in order to achieve redundancy. Clearly, with the need for network availability, there is a steadily growing demand for multi-homing. The idea of the NorNet Core project is to establish a Future Internet research testbed with multi-homed sites, in order to allow researchers to perform experiments with multi-homed systems. Particular use cases for this testbed include realistic experiments in the areas of multi-path routing, load balancing, multi-path transport protocols, overlay networks and network resilience. In this paper, we introduce the NorNet Core testbed as well as its architecture.

On the performance of reliable server pooling systems

Reliable server pooling (RSerPool) is a protocol framework for server redundancy and session failover, currently under standardization by the IETF RSerPool WG. While the basic ideas of RSerPool are not new, their combination into one architecture is. Some research into the performance of RSerPool for certain specific applications has been made, but a detailed, application-independent sensitivity analysis of the system parameters is still missing. The goal of this paper, after an application-independent, generic quantification of RSerPool systems and definition of performance metrics for both service provider and user, is to systematically investigate RSerPools behavior on changes of workload and system parameters to give basic guidelines on designing efficient RSerPool systems