Archive for the ‘multipath’ tag
MARS accepted at IEEE ICNP
Our paper on "MARS: Multipath Adaptive Reliable Service has been accepted for publication at the 34th IEEE International Conference on Network Protocols (ICNP).
Abstract
Multipath transport is increasingly important for Internet/WAN services that move large data volumes across heterogeneous paths, including geo-distributed analytics, content distribution, and cloud-service pipelines. Existing solutions, however, face a practical trade-off: end-to-end transports such as MPTCP and MPQUIC are deployable but limited by endpointvisible paths and delayed congestion feedback, while routingor forwarder-assisted approaches often require infrastructure support or lack safe coordination across forwarding choices.
This paper presents MARS, a receiver-driven, forwarder-assisted multipath transport for Internet/WAN environments. MARS combines tier-synchronized overlay path discovery with coupled consumer/forwarder congestion control, enabling it to safely expand usable forwarding opportunities and react near bottlenecks. It runs as an incrementally deployable UDP overlay at clients, servers, relays, or CDN-like nodes.
We implement MARS in simulation and as a working prototype, and evaluate it through large-scale simulation and Mininet emulation under different deployment scales, loss rates, and failure scenarios. The results show that MARS provides deployment-dependent benefits: with endpoint-only deployment, it remains competitive with end-to-end multipath baselines; with cooperating overlay forwarders, it exposes richer usable path diversity and reduces max p95 flow completion time by up to 81.5% over ECMP-limited baselines. Even against path-expanded end-to-end baselines given the same path set, MARS achieves lower worst-case p95 FCT and stronger robustness under packet loss, while also recovering quickly from transient link failures.
These results demonstrate that ICN-style receiver-driven forwarding can serve as a deployable overlay transport substrate for WAN multipath, providing benefits beyond purely end-to-end designs without
requiring changes to IP routing.
Reference
Yitong Li, Xinjiao Li, Dirk Kutscher; MARS: Multipath Adaptive Reliable Service, accepted for publication at the 34th IEEE International Conference on Network Protocols (ICNP); Tempe, Arizona, USA, October 05-08, 2026