mFAST: A Multipath Congestion Control Protocol for High Bandwidth-Delay Connection

Today, the smart devices are usually equipped with more than one network interfaces. A multipath congestion control protocol that exploits different paths to transmit data will improve the throughput and high-availability. Many multipath congestion control protocols have been developed in the literature. However, most of them are loss-based algorithms, hence they do not well utilize the bandwidth in high bandwidth-delay product (BDP) connections due to the conservative congestion control. From the single-path Fast TCP, we develop a multipath congestion control protocol, called mFast, for high BDP connections. MFast uses queueing delay to measure the congestion as Fast TCP does. Our framework is based on a network utility maximization model for multipath flows. The features of mFast such as load-balancing, TCP friendliness, and throughput improvement are verified via analysis and extensive simulations.