MTCP: A transmission control protocol for multi-provider environment

Abstract

Transmission schemes that gain content from multiple servers concurrently have been highlighted due to their ability to provide bandwidth aggregation, stability on dynamic server departure, and load balancing. Previous approaches employ parallel downloading in the transport layer to minimize the receiver buffer size and maximize bandwidth utilization. However, they only focus on the receiver operations and induce considerable overhead at the senders in contradiction to the main goal of a multi-provider environment, offloading popular servers through replication. In the present work, the authors propose MTCP, a novel transport layer protocol that focuses on reduction of the sender overhead through the elimination of unnecessary disk I/Os and efficient buffer cache utilization. MTCP also balances trade-off objectives to minimize buffering at receivers and maximize the request locality at senders.