Analyzing Multipath TCP Over Dual-LTE in the Wild
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Is two greater than one?: Analyzing Multipath TCP over Dual-LTE in the Wild Nitinder Mohan Tanya Shreedhar Aleksandr Zavodovski University of Helsinki IIIT-Delhi University of Helsinki Finland India Finland Jussi Kangasharju Sanjit K. Kaul University of Helsinki IIIT-Delhi Finland India ABSTRACT combinations with large delay differences, e.g. WiFi and Multipath TCP (MPTCP) is a standardized TCP extension LTE [5]. However, we believe that MPTCP’s most pragmatic which allows end-hosts to simultaneously exploit all of their use is in multi-LTE networks for two reasons. First, mod- network interfaces. The recent proliferation of dual-SIM mo- ern smartphones are often equipped with dual-SIM slots and bile phones makes multi-LTE MPTCP setup an attractive chipsets enabling the use of two LTE connections. [8]. Second, option. We perform extensive measurements of MPTCP over vast coverage areas, large combined bandwidth and reliable two LTE connections in low and high-speed mobility sce- packet delivery offered by multi-LTE connections can enable narios over five months, both in controlled and in-the-wild effective deployment of emerging technologies discussed environments. Our findings indicate that MPTCP perfor- above. Also, intuitively, none of MPTCP heterogeneity is- mance decreases at high speeds due to increased frequency sues should affect a multi-LTE setup as both paths exhibit of signal strength drops and handovers. Both LTE paths ex- similar characteristics with similar delays to the server. perience frequent changes which result in a sub-optimal In this paper, we conduct to our knowledge the first com- subflow utilization. We also find that while path changes prehensive measurement study of MPTCP over multi-carrier are unpredictable, their impact on MPTCP follows a deter- LTE connections in day-to-day mobility scenarios. Over a pe- ministic trend. Finally, we show that both application traffic riod of five months, we performed extensive data collection in patterns and congestion control variants impact MPTCP controlled environments and in-the-wild to understand the adaptability at high speeds. impact of last-mile quality, mobility and application work- load on MPTCP performance. Our key findings are: (1) MPTCP bandwidth gains over two LTE connections de- 1 INTRODUCTION crease significantly with increasing mobility. Downloads According to CISCO, global mobile data traffic has grown over MPTCP take over twice as long at speeds >60km/h, 17-fold between 2012-2017 and 71% in a single year [3]. LTE performing even worse than a single TCP most of the time. is widely deployed [20] and future technologies, such as 5G, (2) Frequent signal strength drops and handovers are the strengthen the need for efficient protocols over cellular links. cause of MPTCP deterioration at high speeds. Such changes Studies show that TCP performs poorly over LTE, especially can induce 10-fold RTT spikes on a subflow resulting in when the user is mobile, primarily due to the large variability severely increased queuing and reordering delays. in network conditions [10, 18]. This deterioration is further (3) Contrary to our intuitions, we find that MPTCP exhibits arXiv:1909.02601v1 [cs.NI] 5 Sep 2019 heightened due to presence of large buffers within the ISP a skewed subflow utilization as both LTE paths experiences network which often results in TCP connection stalls and last-mile changes at varying time and frequency which often ineffective link utilization due to excessive queueing [10, 12]. overlaps with each other. Multipath TCP (MPTCP) is a TCP extension allowing un- (4) Although LTE last-mile changes are unpredictable at modified applications to leverage multiple network interfaces high speeds, their impact on MPTCP follows a deterministic to form parallel TCP connections between end-hosts [22]. trend. This allows monitoring occurrences of link changes Researchers have studied and analyzed its impact on emerg- and circumventing their effects to maintain MPTCP’s benefit ing technologies (AR/VR [9], IoT [17], edge computing [16] over multiple connections. etc.) while exploiting multiple network types such as WiFi, (5) Tweaking application traffic burstiness and congestion cellular and ethernet [4]. MPTCP kernel is available as open- control schemes can also assist the protocol in its adaptabil- source and is in use, e.g., by Apple in their iOS devices [1]. ity and robustness at high speeds. Our analysis shows an Despite these efforts, MPTCP faces several challenges in mo- improvement of 75% QoE and 18% throughput in MPTCP. bile networks, such as failing to use heterogeneous network Manuscript, , N. Mohan, T. Shreedhar, A. Zavodovski, J. Kangasharju, and S.K. Kaul 2 BACKGROUND & RELATED WORK MPTCP is in-kernel extension to TCP that allow multi-homed Core RAN hosts to use multiple parallel TCP connections over each ISP A network interface. Data packets from the application are scheduled to one of the underlying TCP subflows by sched- Core Client Internet Server uler [26]. The default minSRTT scheduler [21] prioritizes the RAN subflow with lowest smoothed round trip time (SRTT) to ISP B the receiver. In variable delay networks, the scheduler is Figure 1: Data collection setup. Client is MPTCP- known to produce out-of-order packets at the receiver as capable RPi equipped with two LTE connections from they experience different delays on parallel paths27 [ ]. Such different ISPs. Server is an AWS ec2 instance. packets are buffered at the receiver and are only delivered "in-order" to the application. MPTCP minimizes additional as scheduling, routing, priority queue etc., can differ for each reordering delays by employing coupled congestion mecha- ISP depending on its QoS promises. nisms at the sender which balance packet congestion over all subflows [24]. 3.1 Setup Configuration Previous studies have focused on analyzing MPTCP over We designed our measurement setup as shown in Figure 1. heterogeneous networks such as WiFi and cellular. The key We conducted our experiments in the capital region of a takeaway is that MPTCP performance is limited due to con- European country from September 2018 to February 2019. sistent delay difference between both paths resulting in in- Our test device is a Raspberry Pi 2 (RPi) equipped with two effective utilization [4, 19]. Little attention has been paid Telewell CAT4 LTE USB modems. The RPi runs Raspbian OS to MPTCP in multi-LTE networks. LTE connections are re- over latest MPTCP v0.94 [22] and is powered by an external silient to packet losses and offer high bandwidth aggregation battery to enable mobility. We equip USB modems with LTE opportunity for MPTCP [10]. However, studies analyzing connections from two major cellular providers, ISP A and ISP TCP over LTE have shown that with increasing mobility, TCP B; capped to 150 Mbps downlink and 50 Mbps uplink. Both performance degrades due to delays in connection establish- ISP’s offer extensive network coverage in the region with al- ment, timeouts and interruptions [18, 25]. At high speeds, most equal LTE basestation (BS) deployment density. As the TCP packets experience excessive on-device and in-network server, we set up AWS ec2 instances running MPTCP v0.94 queuing along with packet losses [15, 28]. Therefore, it is per- on 32 GB RAM, 1 Gbps ethernet, 16-core 2.4GHz CPU and tinent to understand whether MPTCP provides any benefits Ubuntu 18.04. Both cellular providers have non-intersecting to mobile clients while utilizing multiple LTE paths. network path to AWS, which we verify by periodically run- Study by Li et al. [14] is closest to ours. While the authors ning traceroute over both connections. By default, both analyze MPTCP using dual-LTE in very high-speed rails client and server use minSRTT scheduler and CUBIC con- (>250km/h), our work focuses on understanding MPTCP’s gestion control [7]. In stable conditions, we observe ≈ 54 ms behavior in day-to-day mobility using generic transportation RTT to the server over both ISP connections. modes (<100km/h), such as walking, driving, etc. Further- more, the focal point of authors work in [14] was to study 3.2 Data Collection LTE handover’s impact on MPTCP performance. On the other hand, we investigate the correlation between any/all We built a BASH-based data collector for RPi which per- last-mile link changes (signal drops, handovers) and other forms the following tasks: network measurements and mobil- network parameters (app traffic, congestion control) on MPTCP. ity detection, data transfer and upload to measurement server. Network Measurements. Every second (defined as "pe- riod") the data collector queries attached LTE modems with 3 MEASUREMENT & ANALYSIS METHOD AT commands and logs their current signal strength (dBm) Our aim is to analyze MPTCP performance over two distinct and associated basestation ID (BSID). As we wish to ana- LTE connections in different mobility. We elected to use a lyze the impact of mobility on MPTCP, it is necessary to device equipped with two separate LTE antennas. Current detect when the RPi is mobile. However, unlike smartphones, dual-SIM enabled smartphones are fitted with a single an- the RPi cannot infer mobility using conventional techniques tenna which is time-shared by both connections [8]. Our due to lack of a built-in accelerometer or GPS. We over- aim in using two antennas is to establish the upper bound came this limitation by constantly monitoring changes in on MPTCP performance and not be limited, e.g., by NIC signal strength (δsiдnal ) over both modems. The collector queuing due to resource contention. We also wanted to use flags δsiдnal ≥ 6dBm on either modem as “mobility start" multiple ISPs since the internal network configuration, such and initiates data transfer. We found 6dBm to be the best fit Is Two Greater Than One? Manuscript, , MPTCP TCP File Video = 2 or 4 = 6 or 8 > 8 Handovers Conns.