An Evaluation of Multi-path Transmission Control Protocol (M/TCP) with Robust Acknowledgement Schemes

We present a new end-to-end transport protocol called Multipath Transmission Control Protocol (M/TCP) and its robust acknowledgement (ACK) schemes. M/TCP is designed as an alternative TCP option to improve reliability and performance of today’s Internet. M/TCP allows a sender to simultaneously transmit data via multiple controlled paths to the same destination. The protocol requires no modification in IP layer. In order to establish multiple paths, however, two endpoints communicating through M/TCP need to be subscribed to multiple ISPs. Congestion control and error recovery in M/TCP are developed based on those in TCP. The ACK schemes introduced in this paper provide a mechanism to improve M/TCP performance over Internets with high packet-loss in an ACK channel. We compare performance of M/TCP with TCP Reno implementation using ns2 simulator. Simulation results show that M/TCP can achieve significantly higher throughput than TCP Reno in the presence of error model on forward and reverse paths.