Applying techniques of application layer striping to improve the utilization of a single TCP connection

The Transport Control Protocol (TCP) provides robust consumption of network bandwidth when multiple connections are active across a network link with a high-bandwidth delay product. Yet individual TCP connections can fall short of consuming available bandwidth. Application layer striping allows a single application to open multiple connections to one or more endpoints and parcel or reconstitute data across each link. The benefits of applying this technique to the network transport layer would allow more efficient consumption of network resources. The throughput characteristics could also demonstrate more normalized adjustments based on network events, providing a smooth transmission stream for time-sensitive information like streaming media applications. We examine a design which applies this technique to implement a composite stream with a configurable number of virtual streams with a sender-side only modification. We provide a background survey of existing approaches to this problem, and analysis of our approach.