Introducing multipath selection for concurrent multipath transfer in the future internet

It is essential for the Future Internet to fully support multihoming and select most appropriate paths for Concurrent Multipath Transfer (CMT). In real complex networks, different paths are likely to overlap each other and even share bottlenecks which can weaken the path diversity gained through CMT. Spurred by this observation, it is necessary to select multiple independent paths insofar as possible. However, the path correlation lurks behind the IP/network layer topology, so we have to fall back to end-to-end probes to estimate this correlation by analyzing path delay characteristics. In this paper, we present the first step towards a new topic of correlation-aware multipath selection, with formal and systematic problem definition, modeling and solution. Based on a well-designed delay probing, a Grouping-based Multipath Selection (GMS) mechanism is developed to avoid underlying shared bottlenecks between topologically joint paths. In addition, we further propose a practical functionality framework and define a novel multihoming sublayer for the exchange of the multipath capabilities. Extensive simulations demonstrate that the GMS under different network conditions performs much better than other selection schemes, even with burst background traffic.