Telltale twin: Mutual information in multipath TCP subflows

Abstract

Multipath Transmission Control Protocol (MPTCP) creates multiple subflows using the a vailable network interfaces of the device to provide a single network connection between the two hosts. Each subflow is a TCP connection a nd MPTCP uses TCP options field to communicate the control signals related to the MPTCP operations. MPTCP exposes single TCP connection to the application and multiplexes traffic to the subflows based on their path characteristics. Therefore, the subflow characteristics are interrelated. We hypothesise that by observing one subflow, the network related information of the unseen subflow can be inferred.