Secure multipath transport for legacy Internet applications

Multi-interface mobile devices and multi-homed residential Internet connections are becoming commonplace. However, standard transport protocols TCP and SCTP are unable to take advantage of several available paths so that the application using a single transport connection would receive the aggregate bandwidth of all paths. Multihoming and advanced security features make the Host Identity Protocol a good candidate to provide multipath data delivery. In this paper, we design and implement a multipath scheduler that distributes the incoming traffic among multiple available paths. Using Fastest Path First scheduling, packets from a single TCP connection could be spread to multiple paths with no reordering. Our simulations confirm effectiveness and TCP-friendliness of multipath transfer for a range of path bandwidths and in the presence of cross-traffic.