Subject: [tcpm] FW: Middleboxes to aid the deployment of MPTCP

From: "Scharf, Michael (Nokia - DE/Stuttgart)" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 19 Jul 2017 14:26:44 +0000

Heads-up to those not following tsv-area:

The document https://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-bonaventure-mptcp-converters-01.txt originates in the MPTCP WG, but may actually be a general mechanism that could be used for any TCP extension.

We would like to ensure that the TCPM WG is aware of this document.

For the moment, please discuss on the tsv-area list.

Thanks

Michael

-----Original Message-----
From: tsv-area [mailto:[email-masked]] On Behalf Of Olivier Bonaventure
Sent: Wednesday, July 19, 2017 12:22 AM
To: Internet Area <[email-masked]>; [email-masked]
Subject: Middleboxes to aid the deployment of MPTCP

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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