BATCP: Bandwidth-Aggregation Transmission Control Protocol

Abstract

The Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) is the most used transport protocol to exchange reliable data between network devices. A considerable number of extensions have been implemented into TCP to achieve better performance. In this paper, we will present, describe, implement, and analyze a new protocol extension called Bandwidth-Aggregation TCP (BATCP), which enables the concurrent use of network interfaces, to improve network performance on multi-homed nodes. BATCP allows the use of multiple TCP connections to accept multiple IP addresses from a multi-homed node, scheduling segments among them based on a scheduling algorithm. Our results show that BATCP achieves full exploitation of each network interface, achieving up to 100% network utilization using two ADSL connections in real-world scenarios. MultiPath TCP (MPTCP) is currently being standardized, and achieves up to 96% of network utilization when in ideal conditions. BATCP and MPTCP are the only protocols tested on real-world scenarios. Related work such as the Proxy Inverse Multiplexer, called PRISM, and bandwidth aggregation with Stream Control Transmission Protocol (SCTP) achieve 80% utilization or less with network simulators.