Improving TCP performance in buffer-bloated cellular networks via dynamic receive window adjustment
Haiqing Jiang, Yaogong Wang, Kyunghan Lee, Injong Rhee · NCSU Libraries Repository (North Carolina State University Libraries) · 2012
As smart phones and tablets become more and more popular, TCP performance over cellular networks is of growing importance for today's Internet.However, our extensive measurements over 3G/4G networks of four major U.S. carriers and the largest carrier in Korea reveal that TCP may suffer from extremely long delay and sub-optimal throughput.From the measurements, an important problem of TCP in cellular networks is observed: the current cellular networks are over-buffered and the huge buffers nullify lossbased TCP congestion control, resulting in excessive growth of congestion window.To mitigate the problem, smart phone vendors rely on an ad-hoc solution that sets the maximum receive buffer size to a relatively small constant value than its actual size.Although this simple scheme alleviates the problem, it is sub-optimal in a number of scenarios due to its static nature.In this paper, we propose dynamic receive window adjustment (DRWA) and implement it in Android phones.DRWA only requires modifications on smart phones and is immediately deployable.Our extensive real-world tests confirm that DRWA reduces the average delay of TCP by 24.09 ∼ 48.97% in general scenarios and achieves up to 51.06% throughput improvement in specific scenarios.