Evolving the internet with connection acrobatics

Over the last couple of decades, middleboxes have become pervasive across the Internet. However, the Internet archi- tecture has failed to evolve to integrate them as first class citizens. This results in more fragile Internet as most of the communications rely on state transparently stored in middleboxes along the path. In this paper we propose an evolution of the Internet architecture to make the middle- boxes an explicit part of the Internet communications. We do so using the new Multipath TCP (MPTCP) protocol re- cently standardized at the Internet Engineering Task Force. MPTCP allows us to change the endpoints of the connec- tion and by extension to explicitly add middleboxes in the middle of an ongoing communication. We show that the pro- posed solution accommodates nicely several widely used use cases including load balancing, DDoS filtering and anycast services. We implement a few of the use cases as a proof of concept.