Achieving Robust Mobile Web Content Delivery Performance Based on Multiple Coordinated QUIC Connections

Abstract

In order to minimize the downloading time of short-lived applications like Web browsing, Web application, and short video clips, the recently standardized HTTP/2 adopts stream multiplexing on one single TCP connection. However, aggregating all content objects within one single connection suffers from the head-of-line blocking issue. Quick UDP Internet connection (QUIC), by eliminating such an issue on the basis of UDP, is expected to further reduce the content downloading time. However, in mobile network environments, the single connection strategy still leads to a degraded and high-variant completion time due to the unexpected hindrance of congestion window growth caused by the common but uncertain fluctuations in round trip time and also random loss event at the air interface. To retain resilient congestion window against such network fluctuations, we propose an intelligent connection management scheme based on QUIC which not only employs adaptively multiple connections but also conducts a tailored state and congestion window synchronization between these parallel connections upon the detection of network fluctuation events. According to the performance evaluation results obtained from an LTE-A/Wi-Fi testing network, the proposed multiple QUIC scheme can effectively overcome the limitations of different congestion control algorithms (e.g., the loss-based new reno/CUBIC and the rate-based BBR), achieving substantial performance improvement in both median (up to 59.1%) and 95th completion time (up to 72.3%). The significance of this piece of work is to achieve highly robust short-lived content downloading performance against various uncertainties of network conditions as well as with different congestion control schemes.