Multi-Path TCP Performance Evaluation in Dual-Homed (Wired/Wireless) Devices

Multipath TCP is a major extension of TCP, designed for leveraging the increasing availability of multiple interfaces in end hosts, on one side, and the existence of diverse Internet paths between hosts, on the other. This paper proposes a measurement methodology and provides a first evaluation, based on real Internet experiments, of the user benefit of using MPTCP instead of TCP in devices with multiple wireless/wired networking interfaces. We focus on bandwidth utilization and file transfer delays. Our experiments, on a testbed with two disjoint paths connecting a server and a dual-homed probe, indicate that MPTCP is able, in most cases, to take advantage of additional bandwidth with limited cost in terms of delay, but also show that the MPTCP bandwidth benefit substantially degrades when the interfaces have very different bandwidth capacities.