Hercules: High-Speed Bulk-Transfer over SCION

With the steady increase in the resolution of cameras and screens, and the ever-expanding creation of information, data volumes have been rising exponentially. However, standard bulk-transfer still performs inefficiently and require complex configuration, especially for high-speed long-distance transfers. While next-generation Internet architectures promise significant improvements through path-aware networking (PAN), their adoption requires modern tools. To overcome these limitations, we propose Hercules, which combines efficient host networking and congestion control in the first high-speed bulk-transfer tool with native multipath support. We show that Hercules is outperforming bulk-transfer tools (GridFTP, bbcp) in intercontinental transfers, achieving up to 90% increase in goodput. Even in local testbeds, Hercules achieves competitive goodput in a 1500-byte MTU environment, and outperforms bbcp and GridFTP using a 3400-byte MTU. Finally, we demonstrate how Hercules natively aggregates multiple inter-domain paths while behaving fair to competing flows.