Towards a Multipath TCP Aware Load Balancer

Multipath TCP has been recently introduced in order to allow a better resource consumption and user quality-of-experience. This is achieved by allowing a connection between two hosts through multiple subflows. However, with the rise of middleboxes and inherent Internet ossification, the large-scale deployment of this TCP extension is difficult. In particular, a load balancer at the entry point of a data center may forward subflows to different servers, canceling so the advantages of Multipath TCP.

In this paper, we introduce MpLB, a Multipath TCP aware load balancer that fixes this particular issue without any modification to the Multipath TCP protocol itself. We demonstrate advantages of MpLB through a proof-of-concept.