Contributing to Multipath TCP in six Ph.D. theses
Multipath TCP is a major extension TCP extension that has attracted a lot of interest from both academia, with more than one thousand citations for RFC 6824 and industry with deployments by Apple, Samsung, Huawei, LG, Tessares, … It received the 2019 ACM SIGCOMM’s Networking Systems award. The initial ideas on Multipath TCP emerged within the FP7 Trilogy funded by the European Commission and a large part of the work was carried out within UCLouvain’s IP Networking Lab During the last decade, six Ph.D. theses were granted with results that contributed to the different aspects of Multipath TCP.
- Sébastien Barré wrote the first implementation of Multipath TCP in the Linux kernel. His Ph.D. thesis, Implementation and assessment of Modern Host-based Multipath Solutions, describes this initial implementation and evaluates its performance. He later co-founded Tessares that deploys Multipath TCP solutions for network operators.
- Christoph Paasch moved our Multipath TCP implementation to the next level by designing many enhancements and contributing to the IETF. His Ph.D. thesis, Improving Multipath TCP remains the best reference for the Multipath TCP implementation in the Linux kernel. He then moved to Apple in California where he has pushed Multipath TCP further.
- Gregory Detal focused on making Multipath TCP easier to deploy with Multipath TCP proxies. His Ph.D. thesis, Evaluating and Improving the Deployability of Multipath TCP was the starting point for the creation of Tessares.
- Fabien Duchêne studied different use cases in his Ph.D. entitled Helping the Internet scale by leveraging path diversity. His solution to support Multipath TCP in load-balancers has been included in RFC 8684.
- Viet-Hoang Tran showed in his Ph.D. thesis entitled Measuring and extending Multipath TCP that it is possible to dynamically extend the Linux TCP and MPTCP implementations by using eBPF. A similar approach has been pushed by facebook engineers in the mainline Linux kernel.
- Quentin De Coninck started to work on improving Multipath TCP, but then designed Multipath QUIC and Pluginized QUIC in his Ph.D. entitled Flexible Multipath Transport Protocols