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