TCP over multiple paths revisited: Towards transparent proxy solutions

The idea of using multiple paths to transport TCP traffic seems very attractive due to the potential benefits it may offer. Despite a solid theoretical background and quite substantial implementation attempts, none of the provided proposals was successful enough to fully establish its mark. Therefore, this paper presents and develops a novel approach to carry TCP traffic over multiple paths. The main features of the proposed architecture include: (1) end-to-end transparency, (2) autonomy of the operation (protocol stack transparency), and (3) interoperability with different operating systems (OSs). To demonstrate the potential of the presented architecture, experimental results are provided in one of possible application scenarios, a high capacity local mesh backbone network with bottleneck gateway links.