Relaxing Network Selection for TCP Short
Flows Using SYN Duplication <Abstract> In the current and next generation of mobile networks, a mobile device intuitively has multiple wireless radios such as Wi-Fi, LTE, 5G New Radio, etc. Moreover, most likely, the mobile device continues to use the TCP/IP stack, which limits the devicefs network selection. The application traffic may stick to a default network, which may not have the best performance among the associated ones. That harms the performance of TCP short flows, such as web access. This paper proposes using TCP SYN duplication to relax the constraint, aiming to select the best network at the present moment. The device tries to initialize a TCP connection by duplicating and sending SYN packets via all the available networks. The network, which conveys the earliest SYN/ACK response, will be selected for the data transfer. We implement and evaluate the proposal in a testbed with real Internet connections to show its effectiveness. |