Archive for the ‘multipath’ tag
MARS accepted at IEEE ICNP
How can we obtain the benefits of network-assisted multipath transport without changing Internet routing?
Our paper on "MARS: Multipath Adaptive Reliable Service has been accepted for publication at the 34th IEEE International Conference on Network Protocols (ICNP). It addresses this question by combining receiver-driven transport with lightweight overlay forwarders that safely discover additional forwarding opportunities and coordinate congestion control close to network bottlenecks.
Modern cloud services, geo-distributed AI systems, and large-scale content distribution increasingly depend on moving massive amounts of data across heterogeneous wide-area networks. Existing multipath transports, such as MPTCP and MPQUIC, can only exploit the paths visible to endpoints, while routing-based approaches require changes to network infrastructure.
At a glance, MARS augments traditional endpoint multipath with lightweight receiver-driven overlay forwarding.
MARS (Multipath Adaptive Reliable Service) explores a different direction. Rather than relying solely on endpoint scheduling or modifying Internet routing, MARS introduces lightweight, deployable forwarding assistance in an overlay network.
MARS combines receiver-driven transport with cooperating overlay forwarders that safely discover additional forwarding opportunities and react to congestion much closer to network bottlenecks—all while running as an incrementally deployable UDP overlay that requires no changes to Internet routers or routing protocols.
Key Ideas
- Safe overlay path discovery that expands usable path diversity while preventing forwarding loops, backward steering, and excessive path inflation.
- Receiver-driven congestion control coordinated with intermediate forwarders using lightweight queue feedback.
- Incremental deployment, allowing MARS to operate at endpoints alone while automatically benefiting from additional cooperating overlay forwarders.
- Robust operation under heterogeneous WAN conditions, packet loss, and transient network failures.
Results
We evaluate MARS through both large-scale ndnSIM simulations and a working Mininet prototype.
The results show that:
- MARS remains competitive even with endpoint-only deployment.
- Additional overlay forwarders expose significantly richer path diversity.
- MARS reduces worst-case 95th-percentile Flow Completion Time (FCT) by up to 81.5% compared with ECMP-limited multipath baselines.
- MARS remains robust under packet loss and quickly adapts to transient network failures.
Why It Matters
MARS demonstrates how Information-Centric Networking enables deployable receiver-driven overlay multipath without requiring changes to Internet routing. Rather than replacing today's Internet, MARS shows how lightweight receiver-driven forwarding can incrementally extend existing infrastructures with richer path diversity, faster congestion response, and improved robustness for modern WAN applications.
Reference
- Yitong Li, Xinjiao Li, Dirk Kutscher; MARS: Multipath Adaptive Reliable Service, to appear in the proceedings of the 34th IEEE International Conference on Network Protocols (ICNP); Tempe, Arizona, USA, October 05-08, 2026
- Pre-print on arxiv