A Link-Quality Assisted Transport Layer for High-Frequency Networks

As communication systems move towards 5G and beyond, utilizing a higher carrier frequency is essential to accommodate the exponential increment of data traffic. However, the short-range characteristics of high-frequency bands, such as mmWave and TeraHertz will cause frequent channel quality fluctuations. Also, radio protocol stack events triggered by these channel variations cause increased latency and reduced throughput. The existing transport protocols do not adapt well to such high variability of link quality and irregular network capacity, leading to the under-utilization of the network resources. More-over, the lack of radio link information hampers the transport layer in coping with dynamic channel conditions. The proposed Link Quality-assisted Transport (LQaT) solution estimates the link quality in real-time and notifies the end-host for adapting the transport layer to the varying wireless conditions. LQaT improves congestion/flow control to minimize the impact of link fluctuation and enhance the user experience. The experiments in ns-3 show that LQaT improves throughput up to 34% and reduces latency by up to 28% consistently, with effective link-layer adaptations.