Performance Evaluation of Multi-Path TCP for Data Center and Cloud Workloads

Today's cloud data centers host a wide range of applications including data analytics, batch processing, and interactive processing. These applications require high throughput, low latency, and high reliability from the network. Satisfying these requirements in the face of dynamically varying network conditions remains a challenging problem. Multi-Path TCP (MPTCP) is a recently proposed IETF extension to TCP that divides a conventional TCP flow into multiple subflows so as to utilize multiple paths over the network. Despite the theoretical and practical benefits of MPTCP, its effectiveness for cloud applications and environments remains unclear as there has been little work to quantify the benefits of MPTCP for real cloud applications. We present a broad empirical study of the effectiveness and feasibility of MPTCP for data center and cloud applications, under different network conditions. Our results show that while MPTCP provides useful bandwidth aggregation, congestion avoidance, and improved resiliency for some cloud applications, these benefits do not apply uniformly across applications, especially in cloud settings.