Improving Communication Through Overlay Detours: Pipe Dream Or Actionable Insight?

It has been long observed that communication between a client and a content server using overlay detours may result in substantially better performance than a native path offered by IP routing. Yet the use of detours has been limited to distributed platforms such as Akamai. This paper poses a question how can clients practically take advantage of overlay detours without modification to content servers (which are obviously outside clients control)? We have posited elsewhere that the emergence of gigabit-to-the-home access networks would precipitate a new home network appliance, which would maintain permanent presence on the Internet for the users and have general computing and storage capabilities. Given such an appliance, our vision is that Internet users may form cooperatives in which members agree to serve as waypoints points to each other to improve each other's Internet experience. To make detours transparent to the server, we leverage MPTCP, which normally allows a device to communicate with the server on several network interfaces in parallel but we use it to communicate through external waypoint hosts. The waypoints then mimic MPTCPs subflows to the server, making the server oblivious to the overlay detours as long as it supports MPTCP.