If path-choices are allowed to be chosen optimally or “ selfishly” by the end-system, then coordinated control reaches the best systemwide optimum; as indeed does uncoordinated control, but only if the control objective is the same for all paths (unlike current TCP), and also only if all users agree to use the same number of parallel paths (connections). This optimum can also be reached by limiting each session to a small number of path choices (e.g., 2) but allowing paths to be resampled and better paths to replace existing ones.

This suggests that good design choices for multipath controllers are coordinated controllers or uncoordinated controllers with the RTT bias removed.

acknowledgment

This work was supported in part by the NSF under award CNS-0519922.

 

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Peter Key ( [e-mail]), Microsoft Research, Cambridge, UK.

Laurent Massoulié ( laurent.massoulie@ technicolor.com), Thomson Technology Paris Laboratory, 1, Issy-les-Moulineaux-Moulineau, France.

© 2011 ACM 0001-0782/11/0100 $10.00

Don Towsley ( [e-mail]), Department of Computer Science, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA.

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