[multipathtcp] Load balancing MPTCP

[Costin Raiciu <[e-mail]>]

Dear all,

We have published a paper that presents the design and implementation of a MPTCP load balancer for datacenters.  The paper is called Datacenter Scale Load Balancing for Multipath Transport, will appear in HotMiddlebox 2016 and you can download it here: http://nets.cs.pub.ro/~costin/files/mplb.pdf

In short, we use the unmodified MPTCP protocol but encode the server identifier in the least significant 10bits of the timestamps. This is a hack and we acknowledge it, but it shows that one can build scalable load balancers without changing the protocol.

We are now working on a refinement of our design that will not rely on timestamps. Following Olivier’s suggestion, we will use destination port numbers for subsequent subflows for load balancing purposes (as you know, destination port numbers don’t really matter for subflow setup where the token is used instead). We will write a draft about our solution and present it at the Berlin IETF.

What this work shows is that there is no need to (drastically or at all) change the MPTCP protocol for load balancer support.

Best.
Costin