Janus: A Multi-TCP Framework for Application-Aware Optimization in Mobile Networks

Abstract

As the dominant protocol on the Internet, TCP has attracted significant attention and has been implemented in various ways, each of which optimizes for a single objective such as high throughput or low delay. However, in today's mobile networks that carry traffic from diverse types of flows, this approach may lead to misconfiguration of TCP congestion control algorithms and further degrade performance for many applications. In this paper, we propose Janus, a new transport-layer framework that automatically selects among existing congestion control variants to optimize traffic in accordance with application demands. Janus is easy to deploy because it reuses existing, well-tested congestion control implementations, and does not require any in-network or client-side changes. To explore the potential for this approach, we implement Janus in the Linux kernel and extensively evaluate its performance with both emulated and real Internet traffic. We show Janus outperforms alternative protocols by offering fast convergence times in response to changing network conditions, achieving 5-10X lower delay with comparable or higher throughput. Our approach also significantly improves user-perceived performance according to QoE metrics, with up to 5X fewer interruptions for video streaming applications and 2X faster page loading for web-browsing applications.