eMPTCP: A Framework to Fully Extend Multipath TCP

Abstract

MPTCP provides the basic multipath support for network applications to deliver high throughput and robust communication. However, the original MPTCP is designed with limited extensibility. Various research works have tried to extend MPTCP to attain better performance or richer functionalities. These existing approaches either modify the kernel implementation of MPTCP, which involve considerable engineering efforts and may accidentally introduce safety issues, or control MPTCP via userspace tools, which suffer from restricted functionality support. To address this issue, we propose eMPTCP, an easy-to-use framework to fully extend MPTCP without safety risks. Internally, eMPTCP has a modular and pluggable model which allows operators to specify a comprehensive MPTCP extension as a chain of sub-policies. eMPTCP further enforces the policies through packet header manipulations. To ensure safety, eMPTCP is implemented using eBPF. Despite the stringent constraints of eBPF, we show that it is possible to implement an elaborated framework for a fully extensible MPTCP. Through verifying MPTCP in a number of real-world cases and extensive experiments, we show that eMPTCP is able to support a wide range of MPTCP extensions, while the overhead of eMPTCP operations in the kernel is in the scale of nanosecond, and the extra processing time accounts for only about 0.63% of flows’ transmission time.