A Stream-Aware MPQUIC Scheduler for HTTP Traffic in Mobile Networks

Abstract

A QUIC (Quick UDP Internet Connections) protocol is designed to improve Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) traffic and carries a non-negligible portion of the traffic in the current Internet. As its extension, Multipath QUIC (MPQUIC) provides higher bandwidth and smoother network handover by using multiple network interfaces simultaneously. However, to improve HTTP traffic, there are still some issues not yet carefully addressed in the existing MPQUIC, and packet scheduling is a vital one among the issues. Specifically, existing methods fail to respond to the stream prioritization of HTTP Version 2 (HTTP/2), leading to unsatisfying web page load performance. Besides, managing asymmetric and dynamic network paths is also a challenging issue, which may result in Head-of-Line (HoL) blocking and excessive buffer usage if not effectively handled. In this paper, we present a stream-aware per-packet scheduler, HoL Blocking Eliminating Scheduler (HBES), to improve the performance of MPQUIC in mobile networks. Firstly, HBES provides a fair allocation of aggregated bandwidth for different streams based on their priority. Then, it keeps stream data arriving at the receiver in order by estimating packet arrival time to mitigate HoL blocking and excessive buffer usage. We implement HBES and evaluate its performance in various network scenarios. Experimental results verify the superiority of HBES in reducing stream completion time and buffer occupation over those existing MPQUIC schedulers.