Impact of multi-path routing on TCP performance

Routing packets over multiple disjoint paths towards a destination can increase network utilization by load-balancing the traffic over the network. The drawback of load-balancing is that different paths might have different delay properties, causing packets to be reordered. This can reduce TCP performance significantly, as reordering is interpreted as a sign of congestion. Packet reordering can be avoided by letting the network layer route strictly on flow-level. This will, however, also limit the ability to achieve optimal network throughput. There are also several proposals that try to mitigate the effects of reordering at the transport layer. In this paper, we perform an initial evaluation of such TCP reordering mitigations in multi-radio multi-channel wireless mesh networks when using multi-path routing. We evaluate two TCP reordering mitigation techniques implemented in the Linux kernel. The transport layer mitigations are compared using different multi-path routing strategies. Our findings show that, in general, flow-level routing gives the best TCP performance and that transport layer reordering mitigations only marginally can improve performance.