A novel multipath QUIC protocol with minimized flow complete time for internet content distribution

Abstract

The rapid growth of network services and applications has led to an exponential increase in data flows on the internet. Given the dynamic nature of data traffic in the realm of internet content distribution, traditional TCP/IP network systems often struggle to guarantee reliable network resource utilization and management. The recent advancement of the Quick UDP Internet Connect (QUIC) protocol equips media transfer applications with essential features, including structured flow controlled streams, quick connection establishment, and seamless network path migration. These features are vital for ensuring the efficiency and reliability of network performance and resource utilization, especially when network hosts transmit data flows over end-to-end paths between two endpoints. QUIC greatly improves media transfer performance by reducing both connection setup time and transmission latency. However, it is still constrained by the limitations of single-path bandwidth capacity and its variability. To address this inherent limitation, recent research has delved into the concept of multipath QUIC, which utilizes multiple network paths to transmit data flows concurrently. The benefits of multipath QUIC are twofold: it boosts the overall bandwidth capacity and mitigates flow congestion issues that might plague individual paths. However, many previous studies have depended on basic scheduling policies, like round-robin or shortest-time-first, to distribute data transmission across multiple paths. These policies often overlook the subtle characteristics of network paths, leading to increased link congestion and transmission costs. In this paper, we introduce a novel multipath QUIC strategy aimed at minimizing flow completion time while taking into account both path delay and packet loss rate. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our proposed method compared to standard QUIC, Lowest-RTT-First (LRF) QUIC, and Pluginized QUIC schemes. The relative performance underscores the efficacy of our design in achieving efficient and reliable data transfer in real-world scenarios using the Mininet simulator.