[AusNOG] Apple starting to mainstream Multipath TCP

[Mark Delany]

> If you haven't heard of MPTCP and are interested in what MPTCP might
> mean to the network

As others have said, including Christoph P. at WWDC 2017 last week,
MPTCP has been around for quite a while.

One idea that is emerging from that work is how to deal with the
network at a higher level of abstraction than a Berkeley socket.

One such abstraction is something called Post Sockets:

    https://www.ietf.org/proceedings/96/slides/slides-96-taps-2.pdf
    https://github.com/mami-project/postsocket

It's sort of an async message-oriented approach to networking: "fetch
this piece of content and notify me when it's done".

At first glance that might just seem like another level of abstraction
for solving the same problem but there is a distinct difference. MPTCP
asks the question: what are the best paths to get to the same
end-point? Post Sockets is a trend towards a content-centric approach
which asks the question: how do I get content 'x' that might be
sourced from multiple origins?

Early days, but a content-addressable internet is an intriguing
notion. Imagine all of the Internet is viewed as a bit-torrent where
you might fetch your next movie blob from a cache on your eNodeB or
your neighbour's disk?


Mark.