Speeding up mobile networks with FQ CoDel and MPTCP
Fast Times
© Lead Image © Kirsty Pargeter, 123RF.com
Bufferbloat can take a toll on mobile TCP connections. We'll show you a pair of experimental protocols designed to speed up throughput and reduce latency.
Smartphone sales overtook the sales of PCs as early as 2010 [1][2], and every year, mobile devices work more intensively with data. The Cisco Visual Networking Index (VNI), which predicts global data traffic, expects that the volume of mobile data will increase by a factor of 11 between 2013 and 2018 and will overtake the data volume for wired connections by the end of 2018 [3].
Wireless interfaces come with complications that aren't present in conventional network devices. For instance, power consumption is a limiting factor [4]. Mobile connections also have some special needs when it comes to network performance and quality of service for end-to-end connection between two devices. Performance is measured according to the sizes of throughput, latency, package loss rate, and jitter. Connection initiation, error correction, and flow control all reduce the visible data rate and response time [5] [6] [7].
The central parameters for determining performance are thus goodput and response time. Goodput measures the data rate available to applications, and response time describes the time that passes between when a client makes a request and the server's first response. Both metrics are influenced by processes at all levels of the default layer model.
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