Throughput Performance Comparison of MPT-GRE and MPTCP in the Gigabit Ethernet IPv4/IPv6 Environment

Abstract

Multipath communication technologies is one of the current research fields for infocommunications. No better proof for this than having the specification of the MPTCP protocol, considered the field’s mothership, integrated into the operating systems of multiple corporations (e.g. Apple, Cisco) shorty after being released. The MPTCP multipath solution is practically the extension of the classic TCP protocol with the application of TCPsubflows. Besides its numerous advantages, this multipath protocol has a big drawback as well, namely that it supports data transfer over TCP only. However, for transmitting multimedia traffic, the UDP protocol is the practical choice. Stemming from this idea, the Networks Research Group at the Faculty of Informatics, University of Debrecen, has started development of a multipath communication technology (MPT-GRE) that aims to fulfil this need, providing an alternate solution besides MPTCP. In this paper we provide a comparison based on performance measurements between the MPTCP as a reference and the MPT solution developed by our research group, illustrated via numerous scenarios implemented over quad-path Gigabit Ethernet and IPv4/IPv6 connections.

Keywords

• multipath communication
• MPT-GRE
• MPTCP
• performance analysis
• system throughput
• tunneling