MULTIPATH COMMUNICATIONS USING NAMES

Abstract: Increased host mobility, and multi-homing make IP address management very complex in applications. Due to host mobility, the IP address of a host may change dynamically, and also frequently. Multi-homing leads to multiple IP addresses for a single host. Name-based socket is a solution to address the complex IP address management. It relieves the applications from the overhead, and moves it to the operating system. It uses a constant name, instead of an IP address to establish a connection, thus allowing for the IP address changes during the course of the connection. The current implementation of name-based sockets is on Transmission Control Protocol (TCP). TCP restricts the connection to a single path, even when multiple capable paths are available. Multi-path communication provides higher reliability, and increase throughput. Today, multi-path connections are quite feasible, since many hosts are generally multi-homed. Multipath TCP (MPTCP) is designed to overcome the restrictions in TCP. It renders the ability to simultaneously use multiple paths between the peers. Thus, it offers higher reliability, and better throughput. One of the aims of this Master’s thesis is coalescing MPTCP and name-based socket to provide a mechanism which handles IP address management issues as well as provides high resilience, and throughput. Another important area of research is to discover ways of providing good user experience with IPv6 addresses. Given that IPv6 deployments are still in its infancy, there are high chances that IPv6 is broken. Hence, it is very important to protect the users from these IPv6 outages and thereby motivate the major websites and service providers to use IPv6. This will in turn help in the global deployment of IPv6. Happy eyeballs is a smart approach to determine the best suitable path from a dual-stack client to a dual-stack server. In order to save the users from IPv6 outages, this thesis work also focuses on implementing happy eyeballs on name-based sockets.