A Multipath QUIC Scheduler for Mobile HTTP/2

Abstract

In recent years, QUIC protocol has shown great advantages for HTTPS over TCP in terms of improving handshake delay and head-of-line blocking. Multipath QUIC (MPQUIC) further opens up the opportunity to leverage path diversity for realizing various optimization goals, especially for mobile access. In this paper, we present a context-aware MPQUIC packet scheduler dedicated to mobile HTTP/2. Specifically, the scheduler takes into account the stream priority (from HTTP/2 dependency tree) for stream-aware downlink packet scheduling by exclusively transferring each stream at a time while maintaining the relative stream completing order. Additionally, ACK packets are scheduled by choosing the path with the lowest one-way delay to reduce overall RTT and expedite loss recovery. Real-world experiments show that our scheduler reduces page load time by up to 8.5% and stream average completion time by up to 12.9% over the status-quo.