Application of Multipath Protocols in Stateful Migration Scenarios

The edge computing architecture has steadily gained traction in the recent years and is foreseen to become more and more widespread. The main appeal is the possibility of deploying time-critical mobile services on cloud-like resources, reducing computational power requirements on mobile devices, especially for applications like autonomous driving or unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). While the advantages are clear, there are still many challenges to be faced in this field. They mainly concern the unreliability of the access segment, the limited resources in the edge points of presence (PoP) and the variance in network conditions (both latency and bandwidth). At the same time multipath protocols are emerging as a way to exploit the multiple network interfaces of modern devices to provide more reliability and larger bandwidth. In order to reap the latency benefits of the shorter distance from the user it is important to support mobility through migration, which can however create service downtimes that cannot be tolerated by real-time applications. In this work we will explore the idea of using multipath protocols to facilitate the stateful migration process and reduce the total downtime. We present a literature review on the subject and comment on the properties of three analyzed multipath protocols: MPTCP, MPDCCP and (MP)QUIC.