RBBR: A Receiver-Driven BBR in QUIC for Low-Latency in Cellular Networks

BBR is a promising new congestion control algorithm (CCA) that has been shown to result in significantly lower latency compared to conventional loss-based CCAs. However, in cellular networks, where there is a high variability in the available rate, BBR does not perform as well as expected. In such scenarios, BBR tends to overestimate the available capacity and create queues that cause longer packet delays. In this work, we propose Receiver-driven BBR (RBBR), a modified version of BBR that uses rate estimates made at the receiver side rather than at the sender side. We employ a Kalman filter to make a more accurate estimate of the available bandwidth, and we implement the algorithm in QUIC. An evaluation of the proposed CCA is done through extensive 4G trace-based emulations, real 4G network tests and mmWave trace-based emulations representing a 5G scenario. The results show that RBBR is able to achieve an RTT reduction of up to 80% with a worst-case throughput loss of about 30%. The results also show that in real 4G networks, RBBR flows experience a more predictable and consistent RTT than what BBR flows do.