Multipath at the transport layer: An end-to-end resilience mechanism

As society´s dependence on network technology increases, the need for resilience and survivability in these services becomes increasingly apparent. Since the user experience is ultimately determined by the dependability of the end-to-end service, we address this issue at the transport layer. In this paper we introduce a resilient multipath selection algorithm, which obtains multiple end-to-end paths in the WAN context through cross-layer interaction with lower layers of the network. This cross-layer interface is provided by a thin internetwork protocol (PoMo) that supports heterogeneity at trust and policy boundaries. The result is a more resilient end-to-end service provided to applications by taking advantage of redundancy in the underlying physical network. We evaluate the efficiency tradeoffs of the multipath approach on both a synthetic topology and a tier 1 ISP´s backbone network topology.