A Provider-Driven Approach for Multipath UDP Communications. The QUIC Case

Terminals connected to the Internet have several physical or logical interfaces. These terminals, known as multi-interfaces, are thus able to exploit the resources of several distinct paths to establish communication with a remote terminal.

In addition, the virtual hegemony of the TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) transport protocol, used for the establishment of reputedly reliable communications (connection-oriented transport mode) such as Web server consultation via HTTP (Hyper Text Transfer Protocol), is gradually being challenged by the development of protocols favoring the use of connectionless transport modes, such as UDP (User Datagram Protocol).

While protocols such as MPTCP (Multipath TCP) exist for establishing TCP connections over multiple paths, the ability to optimize the use of resources (notably bandwidth) to establish a UDP session over multiple paths has long come up against the limitations of the UDP protocol. The simplicity of this "connectionless" transport mode is due to the absence of a signaling mode and control procedures such as those implemented by TCP.

This article explores generic solutions for establishing UDP sessions over multiple paths, while preserving the simplicity of a connectionless transport mode: the signaling procedure associated with establishing UDP sessions over multiple paths is thus reduced to its strict minimum. In addition, this paper proposes specific solutions for establishing QUIC communication over multiple paths, in order to improve robustness and performance.

These different solutions give operators back control of certain functions (typically, the management of multi-path communications for deterministic traffic distribution) that will enable them to optimize the use of the network resources they are responsible for operating, while improving the level of service quality as perceived by the end user.

Solutions that enable a terminal or residential gateway to optimize the use of available network resources according to the needs and constraints of TCP or UDP-based applications are likely to contribute to a significant improvement in the level of quality associated with the use of such applications.

As some major Internet players are testing and even deploying UDP-based alternatives to TCP, service providers and IP network operators need to provide a comparable level of quality between TCP- and UDP-based applications. As such, this article describes solutions that enable UDP sessions to be established over multiple paths in a way that is functionally comparable to solutions that enable TCP connections to be established over multiple paths.

In particular, this paper proposes solutions for...