No abstract

With the aim of improved throughput with reduced delay, Google proposed the bottleneck bandwidth and round-trip time (BBR) congestion control algorithm in 2016. Contrasting with the traditional loss-based congestion control algorithms, it operates without bottleneck queue formation and packet losses. However, we find unexpected behaviour in BBR during testbed experiments and network simulator 3 (NS-3) simulations. We observe huge packet losses, retransmissions, and large queue formation in the bottleneck in a congested network scenario. We believe this is because of BBR’s nature of sending extra data during the bandwidth probing without considering the network conditions, and the lack of a proper recovery mechanism. In a congested network, the sent extra data creates a large queue in the bottleneck, which is sustained due to insufficient drain time. BBR lacks a proper mechanism to detect such large bottleneck queues, cannot comply with the critical congestion situation properly, and results in excessive retransmission problems. Based on these observations, we propose a derivative of BBR, called “BBR with advanced congestion detection (BBR-ACD)”, that reduces the excessive retransmissions without losing the merits. We propose a novel method to determine an actual congestion situation by considering the packet loss and delay-gradient of round-trip time, and implement a proper recovery mechanism to handle such a congestion situation. Through extensive test and NS-3 simulations, we confirmed that the proposed BBR-ACD could reduce the retransmissions by about 50% while improving the total goodput of the network.

Multipath transmission control protocol (MPTCP) is a promising transport layer protocol that enables a device to utilize multiple communication interfaces simultaneously, thereby achieving high throughput. A congestion control algorithm (CCA) employed in MPTCP constitutes a key part that controls the data flow through different subflows (SFs). There are two fundamental challenges associated with MPTCP CCAs. First, MPTCP flows should have an advantage over single-path flows; second, MPTCP flows should be fair, indicating that SFs sharing a common bottleneck should occupy a capacity fairly close to that required by a single-path flow. Several MPTCP CCAs have been developed; however, they have failed to satisfy these challenges in all scenarios. Recently, Google has introduced the bottleneck bandwidth and round-trip-time (BBR), a new CCA for single-path TCP, achieving high throughput with minimum delay by employing a network model. In the present paper, we propose a novel MPTCP CCA based on BBR named coupled multipath BBR (C-MPBBR) that satisfies the fundamental challenges by exploiting the concept of network modeling in BBR. C-MPBBR addresses the first challenge by closing the lowbandwidth SFs by tracking the delivery rate and bottleneck bandwidth (BtlBW). Then, it satisfies the second challenge through identifying those SFs that share a common bottleneck and dividing the BtlBW share corresponding to a SF among them. We implemented C-MPBBR in the Linux kernel, tested it on a wide range of scenarios by the Mininet emulation experiments, and the real-world Internet, and confirmed that the proposed C-MPBBR outperforms the existing MPTCP CCAs in terms of successfully satisfying the fundamental challenges by ensuring both throughput and fairness.

The 5G cellular network comes with a promise to provide a very high data rate at low latency, which is becoming critical for advancing technologies. Mobile operators are currently deploying the 5G cellular network worldwide. However, because of limited coverage and high susceptibility of the 5G network to obstacles, handoffs from 5G to 4G and vice versa frequently occur, especially when the user equipment (UE) is moving. These handoffs often cause significant delays in data transmission due to packet losses and retransmissions. A promising solution can be to use both 4G and 5G networks simultaneously, which can solve this problem and yield a better throughput. Multipath transmission control protocol (TCP) is an effective solution for this problem, but it requires significant performance evaluation before practical deployment. In this study, we implement an MPTCP testbed based on NS3-DCE that enables to test the performance of MPTCP schedulers and congestion control algorithms (CCAs) in both 3GPP and non-3GPP networks. Through extensive simulation experiments in a scenario where a UE simultaneously utilizes both 4G and 5G networks, we found that blocking estimation (BLEST) scheduler implemented with balanced linked adaptation (BALIA) CCA can produce the highest throughput and lowest delay. Finally, we showed how received signal to interference and noise ratio (SINR), congestion window, throughput, and packet losses are interconnected.

The Congestion Control Algorithm (CCA) in the Multipath Transmission Control Protocol (MPTCP) is fundamental to controlling the flow of data through multiple subflows (SF) simultaneously. The MPTCP CCA has two design goals: first, always ensure better throughput than single path TCP (SPTCP) flows, and second, collectively, MPTCP SFs going through a shared bottleneck (SB) should occupy bandwidth fairly, i.e., close to the bandwidth occupied by an SPTCP flow. Although several MPTCP CCAs exist, they primarily focus on specific scenarios and could not satisfy the design goals in diverse and dynamic scenarios. Recently, CUBIC has become a widely used CCA for SPTCP for its better compatibility with high-speed internet. CUBIC’s effective implementation in the MPTCP is expected to provide improved throughput and fairer behavior, thus satisfying the design goals. However, although the current multipath CUBIC (MPCUBIC) implementation ensures better fairness, it fails to ensure better throughput. We believe the application of same rule for SFs going through an SB and non-shared bottleneck (NSB) makes it difficult for MPCUBIC to adapt to diverse and dynamically changing network scenarios, thus resulting in poor throughput. Therefore, we present an improved version of MPCUBIC, namely bottleneck-aware MPCUBIC (BA-MPCUBIC), to resolve the throughput issue. First, we deploy an innovative bottleneck detection method that successfully differentiates between an SB and NSB based on round-trip-time, enhanced congestion notification, and packet loss. Then, we implement SPTCP CUBIC and MPCUBIC as the CCAs for SFs going through NSBs and SBs, respectively. Extensive emulation experiments demonstrate that the BA-MPCUBIC successfully detects SBs and NSBs with the highest detection accuracy and the lowest detection time compared with other approaches. Moreover, BA-MPCUBIC successfully satisfies the MPTCP design goals in the considered diverse and dynamic scenarios by ensuring both better throughput and fairness.