Multipath FTP and Stream Transmission Analysis using the MPT Software Environment

Abstract: The currently used standard Internet communication is restricted to use a single path between the endpoints in a communication session. In the January of 2013 the Multipath TCP technology was established by IETF in order to open the possibility of the multiple path usage. Performance measurements proof that MPTCP efficiently aggregates the paths’ throughput. The MPTCP technology works in the Transport layer, and the application must use TCP protocol. In this paper we introduce a new multipath solution technology: the MPT software environment works in the Network layer, so it allows the usage of the UDP protocol in the Transport layer (e.g. for voice or video stream transmission purpose). We created a four path laboratory environment to measure the performance of the MPT tool in the case of file transfer and multimedia content (stream) transmission. The measurement results show that the MPT software library efficiently aggregates the available throughput values of the paths in the case of file transfer and media transfer. For media transfer keeping the jitter at a low level value is also important. Our measurements show, that the jitter value is low in the MPT multipath environment if the aggregated paths’ throughput is roughly the same, but it will increase when the speed of the paths are different.

Keywords: Multipath communication, dynamic tunnel, throughput aggregation, UDP tunnel