Business Models in a Multipath World

While the Internet has drastically changed business and society over the past decades, its architecture has hardly evolved. As a result, a re-design of current Internet architecture is being proposed [1], because of the pressure from new applications, novel business models and innovative networking technologies. The resource pooling principle [2] advocates making improved use of the Internet’s resources by allowing separate resources (such as links or processing capability) act as if they were a single large resource. One particular manifestation of this principle is the development of multipath transport protocols (specifically Multipath TCP [3]), whereby multiple paths between two endpoints can be pooled to appear to the application as a single transport connection, through dynamic scheduling of traffic across the available paths. This has multiple benefits: not only will it provide higher bandwidth but it will also provide higher resilience to link or node failure. The failure of a path can be regarded as an excessive case of congestion. When multiple paths are used, MPTCP will react to failures by diverting the traffic through paths that are still working and have available capacity. Old and new paths can be used simultaneously and the traffic distribution can adapt to the available rate for each path, without suddenly relocating traffic onto a new path and causing congestion. This provides resilience and robustness, increases resource utilization, and handles more efficiently sudden increases in demand for bandwidth. While these are technical benefits, it is useful to examine the benefits of multipath transport from the perspectives of stakeholders: