Institute of Information Science, Academia Sinica

With the popularity of mobile devices and the pervasive use of cellular technology, there is widespread interest in hybrid networks and on how to achieve robustness and good performance from them. As most smart phones and mobile devices are equipped with dual interfaces (WiFi and 3G/4G), a promising approach is through the use of multi-path TCP, which leverages path diversity to improve performance and provide robust data transfers. In this paper we explore the performance of multi-path TCP in the wild, focusing on simple 2-path multi-path TCP scenarios. We seek to answer the following questions:

How much can a user bene t from using multi-path TCP over cellular and WiFi relative to using the either interface alone? What is the impact of flow size on average latency? What is the e ect of the rate/route control algorithm on performance? We are especially interested in understanding how application level performance is affected when path characteristics (e.g., round trip times and loss rates) are diverse.

We address these questions by conducting measurements using one commercial Internet service provider and three major cellular carriers in the US.

Yung-Chih Chen is a Ph.D. candidate at the school of Computer Science of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. His research interests include mobility modeling, measurements, and system performance evaluation. Prior to joining UMass Amherst, he received a B.S. in Computer Science from National Tsing Hua University, Taiwan, in 2004, and worked as research assistant at the Institution of Information Science at Academia Sinica in Taiwan during 2006 and 2007. He was the award recipient of the Best Theory Session Talk in the MobiCom student workshop in 2011.