On the Latency of Multipath-QUIC in Real-time Applications
Vu Anh Vu, Brenton Walker
Abstract
Recently, the ubiquity of broadband wireless networks has encouraged the growth of real-time network applications. Their strict latency requirements present a challenge for traditional Internet protocols which tend to be designed to optimize mean performance. Two recent developments that show promise for addressing the challenges of real-time applications are QUIC, a UDP-based protocol that has many features of TCP, and multipath transmission, an extension allowing transport layer protocols to transmit data simultaneously over multiple network paths and interfaces. In this paper, we present MAppLE (MPQUIC Application Latency Evaluation platform), which provides the instrumentation needed to evaluate and develop MPQUIC stream multiplexers, stream schedulers, and multipath packet schedulers. We also present our NineTails scheduler, a multipath MPQUIC scheduler that utilizes selective multipath redundancy to control tail loss and near-tail loss latencies. Our experimental results show that in a lossy asymmetric heterogeneous wireless network, our proposed scheduler reduces outlier latencies compared to other existing scheduling algorithms, and improves Quality of Experience (QoE) in video streaming by inducing fewer playback rebuffering events.