Tackling bufferbloat in 3G/4G networks

Abstract

The problem of overbuffering in the current Internet (termed as bufferbloat) has drawn the attention of the research community in recent years. Cellular networks keep large buffers at base stations to smooth out the bursty data traffic over the time-varying channels and are hence apt to bufferbloat. However, despite their growing importance due to the boom of smart phones, we still lack a comprehensive study of bufferbloat in cellular networks and its impact on TCP performance. In this paper, we conducted extensive measurement of the 3G/4G networks of the four major U.S. carriers and the largest carrier in Korea. We revealed the severity of bufferbloat in current cellular networks and discovered some ad-hoc tricks adopted by smart phone vendors to mitigate its impact. Our experiments show that, due to their static nature, these ad-hoc solutions may result in performance degradation under various scenarios. Hence, a dynamic scheme which requires only receiver-side modification and can be easily deployed via over-the-air (OTA) updates is proposed. According to our extensive real-world tests, our proposal may reduce the latency experienced by TCP flows by 25% ~ 49% and increase TCP throughput by up to 51% in certain scenarios.