@online{Aschenbrenner2106.07351,
TITLE = {From Single Lane to Highways: Analyzing the Adoption of Multipath {TCP} in the Internet},
AUTHOR = {Aschenbrenner, Florian and Shreedhar, Tanya and Gasser, Oliver and Mohan, Nitinder and Ott, J{\"o}rg},
LANGUAGE = {eng},
URL = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2106.07351},
EPRINT = {2106.07351},
EPRINTTYPE = {arXiv},
YEAR = {2021},
ABSTRACT = {Multipath TCP (MPTCP) extends traditional TCP to enable simultaneous use of<br>multiple connection endpoints at the source and destination. MPTCP has been<br>under active development since its standardization in 2013, and more recently<br>in February 2020, MPTCP was upstreamed to the Linux kernel.<br> In this paper, we provide the first broad analysis of MPTCPv0 in the<br>Internet. We probe the entire IPv4 address space and an IPv6 hitlist to detect<br>MPTCP-enabled systems operational on port 80 and 443. Our scans reveal a steady<br>increase in MPTCP-capable IPs, reaching 9k+ on IPv4 and a few dozen on IPv6. We<br>also discover a significant share of seemingly MPTCP-capable hosts, an artifact<br>of middleboxes mirroring TCP options. We conduct targeted HTTP(S) measurements<br>towards select hosts and find that middleboxes can aggressively impact the<br>perceived quality of applications utilizing MPTCP. Finally, we analyze two<br>complementary traffic traces from CAIDA and MAWI to shed light on the<br>real-world usage of MPTCP. We find that while MPTCP usage has increased by a<br>factor of 20 over the past few years, its traffic share is still quite low.<br>},
}