Researching Multipath TCP Adoption

Abstract : The adoption process of a new Internet protocol or only a change to an existing one is anything but trivial. The classical diffusion theory does not apply as such for studying protocol adoption because the deployment of a protocol usually requires the involvement of multiple stakeholders with varying interests. Multipath TCP (MPTCP) is a new interesting change to the TCP/IP protocol suite which is an extension to regular TCP. MPTCP exploits the idea of resource pooling principle by splitting the data of a single TCP connection across multiple paths in the Internet. The research introduced in this paper aims to identify and evaluate the incentives of different stakeholders to adopt MPTCP. This paper summarizes the proceedings in MPTCP research from the socio-economic point of view and the plans how MPTCP adoption could be studied further. Also, the main problematics of the research are discussed in the paper.