CQIC: Revisiting Cross-Layer Congestion Control f or Cellular Networks
Venue
Proceedings of The 16th International Workshop on Mobile Computing Systems and Applications (HotMobile), ACM (2015), pp. 45-50
Publication Year
2015
Authors
Feng Lu, Hao Du, Ankur Jain, Geoffrey M. Voelker, Alex C. Snoeren, Andreas Terzis
BibTeX
Abstract
With the advent of high-speed cellular access and the overwhelming popularity of
smartphones, a large percent of today’s Internet content is being delivered via
cellular links. Due to the nature of long-range wireless signal propagation, the
capacity of the last hop cellular link can vary by orders of magnitude within a
short period of time (e.g., a few seconds). Unfortunately, TCP does not perform
well in such fast-changing environments, potentially leading to poor spectrum
utilization and high end-to-end packet delay. In this paper we revisit seminal work
in cross-layer optimization the context of 4G cellular networks. Specifically, we
leverage the rich physical layer information exchanged between base stations
(NodeB) and mobile phones (UE) to predict the capacity of the underlying cellular
link, and propose CQIC, a cross-layer congestion control design. Experiments on
real cellular networks confirm that our capacity estimation method is both accurate
and precise. A CQIC sender uses these capacity estimates to adjust its packet
sending behavior. Our preliminary evaluation reveals that CQIC improves throughput
over TCP by 1.08–2.89 × for small and medium flows. For large flows, CQIC attains
throughput comparable to TCP while reducing the average RTT by 2.38–2.65x.
