发表机构
The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou)（香港科技大学（广州））
机构由 AI 辅助整理，请以论文原文为准。AI 中文总结
本文提出名为MARS的接收端驱动转发辅助多路径传输协议，结合层级同步路径发现与耦合拥塞控制，经仿真验证其在不同部署场景下可降低流完成时间、提升鲁棒性，且无需更改IP路由。
AI 中文摘要
多路径传输对在异构路径间传输大数据量的互联网/广域网（WAN）服务愈发重要，包括地理分布式分析、内容分发及云服务管道。然而现有方案面临实际权衡：端到端传输如MPTCP和MPQUIC虽可部署，但受限于端点可见路径和延迟的拥塞反馈；而路由或转发器辅助的方法常需基础设施支持，或缺乏跨转发选择的安全协调。本文提出MARS，一种适用于互联网/WAN环境、由接收端驱动且由转发器辅助的多路径传输协议。MARS将层级同步的覆盖路径发现与耦合的消费者/转发器拥塞控制相结合，使其能安全扩展可用转发机会并在瓶颈附近快速响应。它作为可增量部署的UDP覆盖层运行于客户端、服务器、中继或类CDN节点。我们通过仿真和原型实现MARS，并在不同部署规模、丢包率及故障场景下，通过大规模仿真和Mininet仿真对其进行评估。结果显示MARS具有与部署相关的优势：仅端点部署时，其性能可与端到端多路径基线竞争；当有协作的覆盖转发器时，它能展现更丰富的可用路径多样性，相比受ECMP限制的基线，最大第95百分位流完成时间（p95 FCT）可降低达81.5%。即便在给定相同路径集、路径扩展的端到端基线中，MARS也能实现更低的最坏情况p95 FCT、更强的丢包鲁棒性，且能从瞬时链路故障中快速恢复。这些结果表明，以信息中心网络（ICN）风格的接收端驱动转发可作为WAN多路径的可部署覆盖传输底层，无需更改IP路由即可提供超越纯端到端设计的优势。
英文摘要
Multipath transport is important for Internet/WAN services that move data volumes across heterogeneous paths, including geo-distributed analytics, content distribution, and cloud-service pipelines. Existing solutions face a trade-off: end-to-end transports such as MPTCP and MPQUIC are deployable but limited by endpoint-visible paths and delayed congestion feedback, while routing- or forwarder-assisted approaches often require infrastructure support or lack safe coordination across forwarding choices. This paper presents MARS, a receiver-driven, forwarder-assisted multipath transport. MARS combines tier-synchronized overlay path discovery with coupled consumer/forwarder congestion control, enabling it to expand usable forwarding opportunities and react near bottlenecks. It runs as an incrementally deployable UDP overlay at clients, servers, relays, or CDN-like nodes. We implement MARS in simulation and as a prototype, and evaluate it through simulation and Mininet emulation across deployment scopes, loss rates, and a forwarding-face outage scenario. Results show MARS provides deployment-dependent benefits: with endpoint-only deployment, it performs comparably to the evaluated ECMP-limited configurations of MPTCP and MPQUIC. With cooperating overlay forwarders, it expands the usable path set from routing-exposed forwarding candidates. Across the tested loss conditions, it reduces maximum T95 by up to 66.7% and 63.9% relative to the evaluated path-expanded MPTCP and MPQUIC configurations, respectively, given the same path set. Path discovery remains lightweight, flow fairness remains high, and MARS degrades gracefully during an emulated forwarding-face outage and recovers quickly after face restoration. Overall, ICN-style receiver-driven forwarding can serve as a deployable overlay transport substrate for coordinated WAN multipath without requiring changes to IP routing.
Comments12 pages, 17 figures, 2 tables. Accepted by IEEE ICNP 2026
