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A 50 Gbps Connection With Multipath TCP

Posted by timothy on from the meanwhile-my-att-dsl-crawls-along-poorly dept.

First time accepted submitter Olivier Bonaventure writes "The TCP protocol is closely coupled with the underlying IP protocol. Once a TCP connection has been established through one IP address, the other packets of the connection must be sent from this address. This makes mobility and load balancing difficult. Multipath TCP is a new extension that solves these old problems by decoupling TCP from the underlying IP. A Multipath TCP connection can send packets over several interfaces/addresses simultaneously while remaining backward compatible with existing TCP applications. Multipath TCP has several use cases, including smartphones that can use both WiFi and 3G, or servers that can pool multiple high-speed interfaces. Christoph Paasch, Gregory Detal and their colleagues who develop the implementation of Multipath TCP in the Linux kernel have achieved 50 Gbps for a single TCP connection [note: link has source code and technical details] by pooling together six 10 Gbps interfaces."

4 of 150 comments (clear)

  1. what's happening with SCTP? by Monkius · · Score: 1, Insightful

    Doesn't SCTP provide for these scenarios (and many more)?

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    Matt
    1. Re:what's happening with SCTP? by fa2k · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Your comment is correct, but NAT is not the core problem. In a world without NAT people would still use stateful firewalls. Those firewalls should be configured to drop anything unknown, because as a principle whitelisting is better than blacklisting.

  2. Re:Request For Comments by dreamchaser · · Score: 3, Insightful

    The first part I read when I heard of this was the security concerns. While there's been a good attempt to address them I am not 100% sold. I guess the proof will be in the pudding as the old saying goes. Anytime you make a new protocol, especially one that is more complex, you run the risk of increased vulnerability.

  3. They should kickstart an appliance by Gerner · · Score: 1, Insightful

    This would be a dream for small businesses and home users. Have 2-4 DSL/Cable/Wireless WAN ports and one port for your LAN/Router. Plug and play for instant redundant internet at a much higher speed than any one low cost connection could provide.