An Effective Experimental Platform for Multipath Transmission Protocol Algorithms and Performance Analysis

Nowadays, the portable devices with multiple wireless interfaces such as WiFi and 4G/LTE, are becoming more and more popular. However, the legacy transport protocols, such as Transmission Control Protocol (TCP), use only one access interface, ignoring the multipath-transmission opportunity. Although MultiPath TCP (MPTCP) has the potential to improve the transmission efficiency by utilizing multiple wireless interfaces, it has not been a mature technology yet, and suffers a number issues. First, this paper reviews the state-of-the-art of MPTCP. Second, since the simulation result is far from being realistic due to the complicated and dynamic environment in wireless networks, we propose an experimental platform to capture the real performance of MPTCP. Finally, through comprehensive experiments, we compare and analyze the performances of the classical MPTCP congestion control algorithms.