Augmented multipath TCP communications

Cloud networking imposes new requirements in terms of connection resiliency and throughput among virtual machines, hypervisors and users. A promising direction is to resort to multipath communications, yet existing protocols still struggle to take advantage of the path diversity offered by IP networks. Multipath TCP (MPTCP) can create several TCP subflows on different interfaces and concurrently forward data on these subflows. Current MPTCP implementations create a full mesh of subflows between IP endhosts, which may be suboptimal according to the topology. We propose to rely on topology information brought by an external protocol in order to improve the MPTCP subflow management; we resort to the Locator/Identifier Separation Protocol (LISP) to retrieve IP path diversity information, to then accordingly create MPTCP subflows. We report noticeable benefits obtained using a large-scale Cloud access test bed, and we describe further work we are conducting in this sense.