On the use of TCP BBR in cellular networks

• TCP BBR (Bottleneck Bandwidth and Round-trip propagation time) is a new TCP variant developed at Google, and which, as of this year, is fully deployed in Googles internal WANs and used by services such as Google.com and YouTube. In contrast to other commonly used TCP variants, TCP BBR is not loss-based but model-based: It builds a model of the network path between communicating nodes in terms of bottleneck bandwidth and minimum round-trip delay and tries to operate at the point where all available bandwidth is used and the round-trip delay is at minimum. Although, TCP BBR has indeed resulted in lower latency and a more efficient usage of bandwidth in fixed networks, its performance over cellular networks is less clear. This paper studies TCP BBR in live mobile networks and through emulations, and compares its performance with TCP NewReno and TCP CUBIC, two of the most commonly used TCP variants. The results from these studies suggest that in most cases TCP BBR outperforms both TCP NewReno and TCP CUBIC, however, not so when the available bandwidth is scarce. In these cases, TCP BBR provides longer file completion times than any of the other two studied TCP variants. Moreover, competing TCP BBR flows do not share the available bandwidth in a fair way, something which, for example, shows up when shorter TCP BBR flows struggle to get its fair share from longer ones. 

Ämnesord

TEKNIK OCH TEKNOLOGIER  -- Elektroteknik och elektronik -- Telekommunikation (hsv//swe)

ENGINEERING AND TECHNOLOGY  -- Electrical Engineering, Electronic Engineering, Information Engineering -- Telecommunications (hsv//eng)

Nyckelord

tcp

bbr

cubic

newreno

4g

lte

mobile

congestion control

Bandwidth

Mobile telecommunication systems

Wireless networks

Available bandwidth

Bottleneck bandwidth

Cellular network

Fixed networks

Model-based OPC

Network condition

Network paths

Round trip delay

Transmission control protocol

Computer Science

Datavetenskap

Publikations- och innehållstyp

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