Stateful-BBR – An Enhanced TCP for Emerging High-Bandwidth Mobile Networks

With the progressive deployment of 5G networks around the world, mobile networks are entering a new era where bandwidth will be breaking through the Gbps barrier. In this work, we investigate the performance of current TCP designs in such high-bandwidth networks, demonstrating the potential bottleneck due to TCP’s Slow-Start mechanism which is an integral component in most TCP designs. For example, transferring a file of 1 MB size in a first-generation 5G network using Linux’s default TCP-Cubic and Google’s TCP-BBR resulted in average throughputs of 18.2 Mbps and 32.8 Mbps, respectively. Compared to the mean available bandwidth of 180 Mbps, the gap is significant. To tackle this problem, we developed an enhanced Stateful-TCP technique to transform BBR into a new S-BBR to accelerate its startup performance to narrow the gap. Results from trace-driven emulated 5G network experiments show that S-BBR could improve BBR’s throughput performance by 50% to 100% while maintaining similar delay performance. This is further validated by an independent competitive benchmark using over 500 clients where S-BBR raised BBR’s throughput by 69%. S-BBR is sender-based and thus can be readily deployed in Internet servers without any requirements from the client side, it retains BBR’s desirable features and so offers a promising solution to enhance mobile applications’ performance in the emerging high-bandwidth mobile and wireless networks.