Patent ID: 8400923

Claim:
A method in a first electronic device that is an edge router to facilitate communications between a subscriber end station running Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and a second electronic device that is one of a second edge router and server end station, the method comprising the steps of: registering an Internet Protocol (IP) address of the subscriber end station with a domain name server to indicate that the subscriber end station is Multipath Transmission Control Protocol (MPTCP) capable, wherein the edge router runs an MPTCP proxy to facilitate the subscriber end station having only the appearance to the second electronic device of being MPTCP capable but in actuality is TCP capable and not MPTCP capable, wherein the second electronic device is running at least one of MPTCP and MPTCP proxy; receiving packets from the subscriber end station destined for the second electronic device or from the second electronic device destined for the subscriber end station; determining that the packets are received from the subscriber end station over a TCP connection or from the second electronic device over an MPTCP connection; in response to determining that the packets are received from the subscriber end station over the TCP connection, performing the following steps: demultiplexing the packets to convert the packets for transmission over the MPTCP connection, whereby utilizing MPTCP for the packets rather than maintaining TCP increases throughput by taking advantage of higher bandwidth capabilities of MPTCP compared to TCP; and transmitting the packets over the MPTCP connection to the second edge router or server end station; and in response to determining that the packets are received from the second electronic device over the MPTCP connection, performing the following steps: multiplexing the packets to convert the packets for transmission over the TCP connection, whereby the edge router converting from MPTCP to TCP allows the subscriber end station to receive packets from the MPTCP connection without reconfiguring its own TCP setup; and transmitting the packets over the TCP connection to the subscriber end station.