Re: [Int-area] Middleboxes to aid the deployment of MPTCP

[Tom Herbert <[e-mail]>]

On Wed, Jul 19, 2017 at 1:46 AM,  <[e-mail]> wrote:
> Hi Erik,
>
> That's the intuitive approach to follow but unfortunately the situation is not that obvious to get into.
>
I can give a little background on the Linux situation. There have been
several attempts to get MPTCP into the stack over the past few years.
Each time the patches were rejected primary because of complexity and
invasiveness. I believe in the initial attempt there were something
like 7,000 LOC change to tcp and that was whittled down to 5K on the
next attempt IIRC. It is not impossible to get the code in the stack,
but it's going to take more work to minimize code change and convince
the maintainer the complexity is justified.

> Network providers do not have a control on the servers and the terminals that are enabled by customers behind the CPE. So making use of MPTCP to grab more resources (when available) or to provide better resiliency (when a network attachment is lost) will require both endpoints to be MPTCP-capable.
>
Network providers don't control CPE is either. I know iOS has support
for MPTCP, AFAIK Android does not (Erik is that correct?). If Android
were shipping it that would be a strong datapoint towards getting
support in Linux.

Tom