Internet applications make use of the services provided by a transport protocol, such as TCP (a reliable, in-order stream protocol). We use this term Transport Service to mean the end-to- end service provided to application by the transport layer.

That service can only be provided correctly if information about the intended usage is supplied from the application. The application may determine this information at the design time, compile time, or run time, and it may include guidance on whether a feature is required, a preference by the application, or something in between.

Multipath TCP (MPTCP) adds the capability of using multiple paths to a regular TCP session. Even though it is designed to be totally backward compatible to applications. The data transport differs compared to regular TCP, and there are several additional degrees of freedom that the particular application may want to exploit.

Multipath TCP is particularly useful in the context of wireless networks using both Wi-Fi and a mobile network is a typical use case. In addition to the gains in throughput from inverse multiplexing, links may be added or dropped as the user moves in or out of coverage without disrupting the end-to-end TCP connection. The problem of link handover is thus solved by abstraction in the transport layer, without any special mechanisms at the network or link level.

Handover functionality can then be implemented at the endpoints without requiring special functionality in the sub-networks according to the Internet's end-to-end principle. Multipath TCP can balance a single TCP connection across multiple interfaces and reach very high throughput.