AQUA: Adding Bandwidth Allocation to QUIC for Metaverse Multi-Stream Applications

Metaverse applications, such as Virtual Reality and E-Health, pose immense challenges for current networks. A single metaverse application may include multiple types of streams (e.g., video, audio, control, IoT and sensors measurements), each with different bandwidth requirements. Although recent protocols like the Quick UDP Internet Connections (QUIC) support multiple streams, they don’t address heterogeneous stream requirements, even when combined with the state-of-the-art congestion control (CC) schemes. Moreover, in most cases, increasing the network capacity, as expected in future networks, such as 6G, can not guarantee that bandwidth requirements are satisfied for all streams. Other challenges include updating stream requirements and changes of network conditions over time.We present AQUA, a novel adaptive bandwidth allocation scheme which improves QoS and supports unbounded number of stream requirements. AQUA is implemented as a QUIC module and was evaluated both in lab and in real-world experiments with different CC schemes. The experiments demonstrate that AQUA significantly outperforms QUIC and preserves utilization and stability, even under high network congestion. AQUA’s code is publicly shared to encourage adoption and contributions from the community.