Datacenter Scale Load Balancing for Multipath Transport

Multipath TCP traffic is on the rise with recent deployments by Apple and Samsung on mobile phones. Despite this, MPTCP adoption on servers is falling behind and the major problem is that Multipath TCP does not work with existing datacenter load balancers. In this work we present MPLB, a distributed load balancer for Multipath TCP traffic. MPLB uses stateless software multiplexers to direct traffic to backend servers and is resilient to mux and network failures, as well as backend server churn. We have implemented and tested MPLB, finding it can handle 6Mpps per machine with minimum-sized packets, seamlessly scale-out or in and gracefully handle mux failures.