Dr Peng Qian

In order to minimize the downloading time of short-lived applications like web browsing, web application and short video clips, the recently standardized HTTP/2 adopts stream multiplexing on one single TCP connection. However, aggregating all content objects within one single connection suffers from the Head-of-Line blocking issue. QUIC, by eliminating such an issue on the basis of UDP, is expected to further reduce the content downloading time. However, in mobile network environments, the single connection strategy still leads to a degraded and high variant completion time due to the unexpected hindrance of congestion window growth caused by the common but uncertain fluctuations in round trip time and also random loss event at the air interface. To retain resilient congestion window against such network fluctuations, we propose an intelligent connection management scheme based on QUIC which not only employs adaptively multiple connections but also conducts a tailored state and congestion window synchronization between these parallel connections upon the detection of network fluctuation events. According to the performance evaluation results obtained from an LTE-A/Wi-Fi testing network, the proposed multiple QUIC scheme can effectively overcome the limitations of different congestion control algorithms (e.g. the loss-based New Reno/CUBIC and the rate-based BBR), achieving substantial performance improvement in both median (up to 59.1%) and 95th completion time (up to 72.3%). The significance of this piece of work is to achieve highly robust short-lived content downloading performance against various uncertainties of network conditions as well as with different congestion control schemes.

With increased complexity of webpages nowadays, computation latency incurred by webpage processing during downloading operations has become a newly identified factor that may substantially affect user experiences in a mobile network. In order to tackle this issue, we propose a simple but effective transport-layer optimization technique which requires necessary context information dissemination from the mobile edge computing (MEC) server to user devices where such an algorithm is actually executed. The key novelty in this case is the mobile edge’s knowledge about webpage content characteristics which is able to increase downloading throughput for user QoE enhancement. Our experiment results based on a real LTE-A test-bed show that, when the proportion of computation latency varies between 20% and 50% (which is typical for today’s webpages), the downloading throughput can be improved up to 34.5%, with reduced downloading time by up to 25.1%

Due to dynamic wireless network conditions and heterogeneous mobile web content complexities, web-based content services in mobile network environments always suffer from long loading time. The new HTTP/2.0 protocol only adopts one single TCP connection, but recent research reveals that in real mobile environments, web downloading using single connection will experience long idle time and low bandwidth utilization, in particular with dynamic network conditions and web page characteristics. In this paper, by leveraging the Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) technique, we present the framework of Mobile Edge Hint (MEH), in order to enhance mobile web downloading performances. Specifically, the mobile edge collects and caches the meta-data of frequently visited web pages and also keeps monitoring the network conditions. Upon receiving requests on these popular webpages, the MEC server is able to hint back to the HTTP/2.0 clients on the optimized number of TCP connections that should be established for downloading the content. From the test results on real LTE testbed equipped with MEH, we observed up to 34.5% time reduction and in the median case the improvement is 20.5% compared to the plain over-the-top (OTT) HTTP/2.0 protocol.