Practical Exercise

The purpose of this exercise is to experience hands-on how mptcp can utilize multiple links to provide aggregate capacity, as well as show a problem with mptcp where aggregation of asymmetric paths can severely degrade the performance versus using only a single link.

The experiment environment consists of the network emulator ’mininet’, running in a Linux virtual machine in VirtualBox. This provides a consistent and reproducible network setup to ensure that you will experience the expected effect of the settings.

VirtualBox to run the virtual machine is available (without cost) at https://www.virtualbox.org/
The virtual machine is available at https://kau.box.com/s/xxv9la6xbhxuvnhvswnjscc77vyd9pvm (download both the large “vdi” file (virtual disk image) and the small “vbox” file (vm configuration file).
The experiment code is available at https://git.cse.kau.se/courses/dvad60/tree/master/multi-access
(Running the code requires a Linux machine with a mptcp kernel and mininet installed, unless you use the virtual machine).

The instructions to perform the exercise is documented in the presentation slideset and the video below.

Slides: https://git.cse.kau.se/courses/dvad60/raw/master/multi-access/dvad63-mptcp-exercise.pdf?inline=false

Video walkthrough