Internet acceleration with LISP traffic engineering and multipath TCP

Abstract

We present different design options to implement Augmented Multipath Transmission Control Protocol (A- MPTCP) communications via a Locator/Identifier Separation Protocol (LISP) Traffic Engineering (TE) overlay network. MPTCP allows a TCP connection using multiple subflows to maximize resource usage. LISP is a routing and addressing architecture that provides new semantics for IP communications, by separating the device identity (endpoint identifier) from its location (routing locator) using two different numbering spaces. Our proposition is to adopt a LISP overlay network with traffic engineering capabilities to steer MPTCP subflows across wide-area Internet networks. The resulting augmentation consists of a subflow forwarding that can reach edge bottleneck capacity and surround inter-domain transit bottlenecks and inefficient paths. It can be particularly useful for cases where, even if endpoints are single-homed, inter-domain path diversity can be grasped by the LISP-TE network overlay. We specify the different modes at which this augmentation can take place, from stateless and light modes with very limited management in the network, to stateful and advanced modes implementable by a network provider desiring a higher control on the network. Based on extensive experimentation on the worldwide LISP testbed, we show that the achievable gains up 25% in throughput, while identifying required further improvements.