MP-H 2 : A Client-only Multipath Solution for HTTP / 2 Ashkan Nikravesh

MP-H2 is a client-only, HTTP-based multipath solution. It enables an HTTP client to fetch content (an HTTP object) over multiple network paths such as WiFi and cellular on smartphones. Compared to MPTCP, MP-H2 offers several key advantages including server transparency, middlebox compatibility, and friendliness to CDN, anycast, and load balancing. MP-H2 strategically splits the file into byte range requests sent over multipath, and dynamically balances the workload across all paths. Furthermore, MP-H2 leverages new features in HTTP/2 including stream multiplexing, flow control, and application-layer PING to boost the performance. MP-H2 also supports multi-homingwhere each path contacts a different CDN server for enhanced performance. Evaluations show that MP-H2 offers only slightly degraded performance (6% on average) while being much easier to deploy compared to MPTCP. Compared to other state-of-the-art HTTP multipath solutions,MP-H2 reduces the file download time by up to 47%, and increases the DASH video streaming bitrate by up to 44%. ACM Reference Format: Ashkan Nikravesh, Yihua Guo, Xiao Zhu, Feng Qian, and Z. Morley Mao. 2019.MP-H2: A Client-only Multipath Solution for HTTP/2. In The 25th Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking (MobiCom ’19), October 21–25, 2019, Los Cabos, Mexico. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 16 pages. https://doi.org/10. 1145/3300061.3300131