Modern industrial and data center networks adopt multipath TCP (MPTCP) to achieve low communication latency. To make full use of multiple paths, MPTCP divides one TCP connection into multiple subflows. Due to the connection-level ACK blocking, however, MPTCP suffers from the traffic burstiness, which leads to large queueing delay, frequent packet drops, and even TCP timeout. To mitigate the traffic burstiness caused by ACK blocking, we propose MPTCP-RB (Multipath TCP with Reduced Burstiness), which interleaves consecutive packets across multiple subflows, instead of assigning consecutive packets to individual subflows. MPTCP-RB is implemented as a loadable Linux kernel module, working on any traditional MPTCP-based schemes without any other modifications on existing network stacks. The testbed and NS2 experiments show that, MPTCP-RB reduces the average flow completion time by up to 91% compared with the state-of-the-art MPTCP-based schemes.

现代工业和数据中心网络采用多路径 TCP (MPTCP) 来实现低通信延迟。为了充分利用多条路径，MPTCP 将一个 TCP 连接划分为多个子流。但是，由于连接级ACK阻塞，MPTCP会受到流量突发的影响，导致排队延迟大，丢包频繁，甚至TCP超时。为了减轻由 ACK 阻塞引起的流量突发，我们提出了 MPTCP-RB（具有降低突发性的多路径 TCP），它在多个子流中交错连续数据包，而不是将连续数据包分配给单个子流。MPTCP-RB 是作为可加载的 Linux 内核模块实现的，可以处理任何传统的基于 MPTCP 的方案，而无需对现有网络堆栈进行任何其他修改。测试台和 NS2 实验表明，