QUIC Throughput and Fairness over Dual Connectivity

Abstract: Dual Connectivity (DC) is an important lower-layer feature accelerating the transition from 4G to 5G that also is expected to play an important role in standalone 5G radio networks. However, even though the packet reordering introduced by DC can significantly impact the performance of upper-layer protocols, no prior work has studied the impact of DC on QUIC. In this paper, we present the first such performance study. Using a series of throughput and fairness experiments, we show how QUIC is affected by different DC parameters, network conditions, and whether the DC implementation aims to improve throughput or reliability. Results for two QUIC implementations (aioquic, ngtcp2) and two congestion control algorithms (NewReno, CUBIC) are presented under both static and highly time-varying network conditions. Our findings provide network operators with insights and understanding into the impacts of splitting QUIC traffic in a DC environment. With reasonably selected DC parameters and increased UDP receive buffers, QUIC over DC performs similarly to TCP over DC and achieves optimal fairness under symmetric link conditions when DC is not used for packet duplication. The insights can help network operators provide modern users with better end-to-end service when deploying DC.