Multipath TCP : the first ten years
The research on Multipath TCP started a bit more than ten years ago with the launch of the FP7 Trilogy project. During this decade, Multipath TCP has evolved a lot. It has also generated a lot of interest within the scientific community with several hundreds of articles that use, extend or reference Multipath TCP. As an illustration of the scientific impact of Multipath TCP, the figure below shows the cumulative number of citations for the sequence of internet drafts that became RFC 6824 according to Google Scholar.
The industrial impact of Multipath TCP is also very important as Apple uses it on all iPhones and several network operators use it to create Hybrid Access Networks that combine xDSL and LTE to provide faster Internet services in rural areas.
On all the remaining days until Christmas, a new post will appear on the Multipath TCP blog to illustrate one particular aspect of Multipath TCP with pointers to relevant scientific papers, commercial deployments, … This series of blog posts will constitute a simple advent calendar that could be useful for network engineers and researchers who want to understand how this new protocol works and why it is becoming more and more important in today’s Internet.
