Enhancing Satellite Communication Performance with MultiWAN using MPTCP: Implementation and Analysis

Abstract

In recent years the availability of more than one active internet connection for devices has been increasingly more common. To take advantage of this many actors have looked into the concept of MultiWAN, which is the use of multiple links for internet connection either simultaneously or as a backup. One of the more promising options for this is the Multipath Transmission Control Protocol (MPTCP), which builds upon the traditional TCP protocol. This thesis presents an evaluation study of MPTCP in a satellite communication environment. It also gives insight into the implementation process, with its limitations and possible workarounds. A broad measurement study has been conducted, looking at a wide range of parameters to gauge the performance of MPTCP compared to TCP, combining a number of different internet connection alternatives. The results show that using the MPTCP in its standard configuration can outperform TCP in some circumstances, but also negatively affect the performance in others. From the evaluation study, we can conclude that the results are highly sensitive to the characteristics of the links, which have different degrees of fluctuation over time. The standard MPTCP implementation performs better the more similar the links are but, from our research, we believe it needs further customisation possibilities to handle combining link types of all characteristics.