R-M/TCP: Protocol for Reliable Multi-Path Transport over the Internet

We extend the previous work on Multi-path Transmission Control Protocol (M/TCP) and propose Rate-based M/TCP (R-M/TCP) for improving reliability and performance of the communications over the Internet. The protocol has been designed as one of TCP options, thus being backward compatible to the standard TCP. It does not require any changes in network infrastructure, but do require some modifications at the end hosts to establish multiple paths. Congestion control in R-M/TCP is performed in a rate-based and loss-avoidance manner. It attempts to estimate the available bandwidth and the queue length of the used routes in order to fully utilize the bandwidth resources. Experimental results show performance advantages of R-M/TCP beyond TCP Reno in the scenario that characteristics in terms of delay and bandwidth of each route are different.