Investigating the Throughput Performance of the MPT-GRE Network Layer Multipath Library in Emulated WAN Environment

Abstract

Nowadays there is a growing demand for a much faster and more secure communication without borders through the internet, which is provoking more and more both network designers and manufacturers of communication devices. Thanks to the BYOD trend, our communication devices can be easily carried anywhere in the world. They generally have several built-in network interfaces (e.g. Ethernet, Wi-Fi, 4G). Theoretically, using these cards in parallel, we could speed up data transmission, and thus communication, by aggregating the channel capabilities of the interfaces. On the other hand, we could make data transmission more secure by applying redundancy to the system. Unfortunately, traditional IP-based communications do not allow the use of parallel interfaces in a given communication session, leaving the hardware capabilities of our communications devices virtually untapped. To address this issue, we have developed a multipath communication solution called MPT-GRE, which we have already tested in several laboratory environments. The measurement results were published in our previous articles. In this paper we are going to test it in a much more realistic environment, using the Dummynet WAN emulation software. The measurement results confirmed that the MPT-GRE multipath solution is able to aggregate the performance of physical connections efficiently in the emulated Fast Ethernet IPv4 WAN environment as well.