On the use of TCP BBR in cellular networksShow others and affiliations
2018 (English)In: IEEE Communications Magazine, ISSN 0163-6804, E-ISSN 1558-1896, no 3, p. 172-179Article in journal (Refereed) Published
Abstract [en]
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.
Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
New York, USA: IEEE, 2018. no 3, p. 172-179
Keywords [en]
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
National Category
Telecommunications
Research subject
Computer Science
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:kau:diva-65339DOI: 10.1109/MCOM.2018.1700725ISI: 000429329400026Scopus ID: 2-s2.0-85044079664OAI: oai:DiVA.org:kau-65339DiVA, id: diva2:1164084
Projects
COST-IC1304HITS, 4707
Funder
EU, Horizon 2020, IC1304Knowledge Foundation2017-12-092017-12-092022-11-23Bibliographically approved