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Ask Slashdot: VPN Setup To Improve Latency Over Multiple Connections?
blogologue writes I've been playing Battlefield for some time now, and having a good ping there is important for a good gaming experience. Now I'm in the situation where I have mobile internet access from two telecom companies, and neither of those connections are stable enough to play games on, the odd ping in hundreds of milliseconds throws everything off. How can I setup a Windows client (my PC) and a Linux server (in a datacenter, connected to the internet) so that the same TCP and UDP traffic goes over both links, and the fastest packet on either link 'wins' and the other is discarded?
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A VPN or any kind of encapsulated network traffic will only add to the latency.
This is why local LAN play with your buddies beats some unknown remote server. Plus, then you can keep playing after the central server is taken offline.
What's that? Your favorite game doesn't support LAN play? Well, better support the ones that do, and not support the ones that don't, if you want this option to remain viable into the future.
That's true, but it seems that the real problem the OP is trying to solve is huge variance in the latency (i.e. jitter) - that is, the idea is to trade a very small amount of extra latency for the latency being much more consistent (without the massive spikes currently being seen). I'm not sure how well it would work in practice (e.g. if some of the spikes are due to local RF interference, it's possible they will affect both connections at the same time), but there's potential at least for a much smoother gaming experience.
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Seems like reading and comprehending the question is not doable for most of the folks in the comments of this story today. If you go back and read what the original poster asked, I think you'll realize that it's completely doable, with some (perhaps significant) effort. Certainly there aren't any out -of-box solutions that I know of. Basically a combination of mTCP and VPN is what he's looking for. The multipath connection is not between him and the gaming server. He wants it between him and a VPS running linux. The gaming server part is the final goal, but nothing to do with his problem or question. He certainly could invent his own tunneling protocol using, say UDP. As an example, if we consider the tcp/ip protocol, each packet has a unique sequence number. So if we take a TCP/IP packet, wrap it in a UDP packet and send one to the server through each interface, the server could unpack the UDP packet, note the sequence number, and if it already saw it recently, discard it. Otherwise, make a note of it and drop it onto the internet. On the return trip, acknowledgements would have to be handled on the client side. IE if one ack comes, we can safely ignore any others for the same sequence number. If no acks come from either pathway, then it's a standard timeout. This is TCP/IP only. I'm sure UDP could be encapsulated in a similar way, ICMP also probably.
As I type this, I wonder if this could be done by hacking OpenVPN. OpenVPN already has udp encapsulation of UDP, ICMP, and TCP/IP. It would just be a matter of hacking in some support to send the same packet out multiple interfaces at once, and then logic to track and discard duplicates. Not sure how long either hand would have to track things for, or how much would have to be tracked.