An MPTCP-compatible load balancing solution for pools of servers in OpenFlow SDN networks

© 2019 IEEE.MultiPath TCP (MPTCP) protocol splits one transport connection into multiple subflows that are treated as normal TCP flows by the network layer. Therefore, the MPTCP subflows are able to use different physical paths between the origin and the destination points. This TCP extension can be used in datacenters to improve communication performance. On the other hand, load balancing techniques are employed in these scenarios to avoid the overload of the systems. When load balancing is combined with MPTCP it is necessary that the subflows belonging to the same MPTCP session are established with the same server in the datacenter. In this work we describe and prove two MPTCP-compatible solutions based on OpenFlow SDN technology that allow the implementation of load balancing services in the presence of MPTCP traffic.