Receiver-Side TCP Countermeasure to Bufferbloat in Wireless Access Networks

Abstract

Bufferbloat has drawn much attention in the network community for its negative impact on TCP delay performance and user QoE. Recently, it has been more commonly noted in wireless access networks, in part, due to over-provisioned buffer space. Previous works that focused only on bufferbloat prevention have suffered from either deployment or fairness problems when coexisting with conventional TCP flows. In this paper, we address the bufferbloat problem in resource-competitive environments such as Wi-Fi, and design a receiver-side countermeasure for easy deployment that does not require any modification at the sender or intermediate routers. Exploiting TCP and AQM dynamics, our scheme competes for shared resource in a fair manner with conventional TCP flow control methods and prevents bufferbloat. We implement our proposed scheme in commercial smart devices and verify its performance through real experiments in LTE and Wi-Fi networks.