QUIC Throughput and Fairness over Dual Connectivity

Abstract

Dual Connectivity (DC) is an important lower-layer feature accelerating the transition from 4G to 5G that also is expected to play an important role in standalone 5G. However, even though the packet reordering introduced by DC can significantly impact the performance of upper-layer protocols, no prior work has studied the impact of DC on QUIC. In this paper, we present the first such performance study. Using a series of throughput and fairness experiments, we show how QUIC is affected by different DC parameters, network conditions, and whether the DC implementation aims to improve throughput or reliability. Results for two QUIC implementations (aioquic, ngtcp2) and two congestion control algorithms (NewReno, CUBIC) are presented under both static and highly time-varying network conditions. Our findings provide insights into the impacts of splitting QUIC traffic in a DC environment. With reasonably selected DC parameters and increased UDP receive buffers, QUIC over DC performs similarly to TCP over DC and achieves optimal fairness under symmetric link conditions when DC is not used for packet duplication. The insights can help network operators provide modern users better end-to-end service when deploying DC.

QUIC Throughput and Fairness over Dual Connectivity

“…Similar to these works, we use JFI here. Finally, this paper is an extended version of our previous work [1].…”

“…Furthermore, like these protocols, DC can be used to achieve improved throughput (by sending different data over different paths), to increase reliability (by transmitting the same data over the different paths), or both. However, in contrast to the transport-layer multipath solutions, DC is performed within the link layer of the network stack and is therefore in practice invisible to ✩ A shorter preliminary version of this work appeared in the IEEE MASCOTS 2020 workshop (Hasselquist et al, 2020) [1].…”