Improving TCP performance in multipath packet forwarding networks

This paper investigates schemes to improve TCP performance in multipath forwarding networks. In multipath routing, packets to the same destination are sent to multiple next-hops in either packet-level or flow-level forwarding mode. Effective bandwidth is increased since we can utilize unused capacity of multiple paths to the destination. In packet-level multipath forwarding networks, TCP performance may not be enhanced due to frequent out-of-order segment arrivals at the receiver because of different delays among paths. To overcome this problem, we propose simple TCP modifications. At the sender, the fast retransmission threshold is adjusted taking the number of paths into consideration. At the receiver, the delayed acknowledgment scheme is modified such that an acknowledgment for an out-of-order segment arrival is delayed in the same way for the in-order one. The number of unnecessary retransmissions and congestion window reductions is diminished, which is verified by extensive simulations. In flow-level multipath forwarding networks, hashing is used at routers to select outgoing link of a packet. Here, we show by simulations that TCP performance is increased in proportion to the number of paths regardless of delay differences.