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

[Olivier Bonaventure <[e-mail]>]

Hello,

The design of Multipath TCP (RFC6824) has been heavily influenced by 
various types of interferences caused by middleboxes. These problems 
have been solved and the protocol is deployed at a large scale by 
several smartphone vendors. One of the remaining items of the charter of 
the MPTCP working group is to "...explore whether an MPTCP-aware 
middlebox would be useful, where at least one end host is MPTCP-enabled."

One of the use cases for those MPTCP-aware middleboxes are the 
smartphones equipped with WiFi and cellular interfaces. Today, there are 
very few servers that support Multipath TCP and smartphones would 
benefit from using MPTCP over the cellular and WiFi network to a 
middlebox that would convert MPTCP into TCP and vice-versa.

The working group has discussed this issue several times and today we 
have presented a new design that supports the creation of such functions 
to convert MPTCP connections into TCP connections and vice versa. The 
design was done with MPTCP in mind, but the proposed solution could be 
more generic and applied to other use cases than MPTCP. The draft that 
describes the new design is available via:

https://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-bonaventure-mptcp-converters-01.txt

Mirja Kuehlewind suggested to send the document on the int-area and 
tsv-area mailing lists to see whether other working groups could be 
interested by this approach. I'm available this week in Prague if 
someone wants to discuss.


Olivier

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