Informed Access Network Selection: The Benefits of Socket Intents for Web Performance

Today’s end-user devices have multiple access networks available and can achieve better application performance by distributing traffic across access networks. However, matching application traffic to the most suitable access network or bundling them is non-trivial, given varying application needs and network performance characteristics. Therefore, we propose an application-informed approach for access network selection (IANS). Based on the size of a Web resource, we select the better access network in terms of latency and available downstream capacity. We implement IANS within our Socket Intents prototype and evaluate its benefits for Web page loads under a variety of network conditions and for various Web pages. IANS provides the highest speedups for scenarios with asymmetric network conditions and for scenarios with low downstream capacity. Here, IANS improves relevant Web metrics by between 500 and 1000 ms in the median, compared to using the better of the two access networks, and may also outperform MPTCP. This confirms that IANS improves application performance over using a single network and, in several scenarios, even using MPTCP.