An in-depth study of Multipath TCP in a domestic environment

Nowadays, telecommunication systems are extensively used every day in numerous applications: file sharing through cloud, instant messaging apps, conference calls, file transfer, videogames, telemedicine, etc... Each application needs a particular set of performance metrics in order to achieve a good user experience. The main ones are: • bandwidth • latency • reliability Network technologies are constantly evolving in order to meet the increasingly strict performance requirements, which is why exploiting the same resources with new approaches could be beneficial, for instance using multiple network connections at the same time when available. Regular services delivered over Internet applications make use of a transport protocol, such as TCP (Transmission Control Protocol), which provides a reliable, connection-oriented service to the invoking application [1], providing a host-to-host connectivity at the transport layer [2]. Multipath TCP (MPTCP) [3] allows such application to use multiple paths, creating several sub-flows to a regular TCP session. The aim of this thesis is to investigate the behaviour of MPTCP and to study the gain introduced in terms of throughput and robustness, whenever different access technologies are available. Keywords: MPTCP, Throughput, FTP