Proxy-Based Adaptive Transmission of MP-QUIC in Internet-of-Things Environment

With the growth of Internet of Things (IoT) services and applications, the efficient transmission of IoT data has been crucially required. The IETF has recently developed the QUIC protocol for UDP-based multiplexed and secure transport. The Multipath QUIC (MP-QUIC) is also being discussed as an extension of QUIC in the multipath network environment. In this paper, we propose a proxy-based adaptive MP-QUIC transmission for throughput enhancement in the IoT environment. In the proposed scheme, a proxy device is employed between IoT clients and IoT server to aggregate the traffics of many clients in the access network. The proxy will transport a large among of traffics to the server, adaptively to the network conditions, by using multiple paths in the backbone network. For this purpose, the proxy device employs a path manager to monitor the current network conditions and a connection manager to manage the MP-QUIC connections with the IoT server over the backbone network with multiple paths. For effective MP-QUIC transmission, the proxy will transmit the prioritized packets to the server using the best path with the lowest round-trip time (RTT), whereas the non-prioritized packets are delivered over the other paths for traffic load balancing in the network. From the testbed experimentations with the MP-QUIC implementation and ns-3 simulation modules, we see that the proposed scheme can outperform the normal QUIC (using a single path) and the existing MP-QUIC scheme (using the round-robin policy) in terms of response delay and total transmission delay. Such performance gaps tend to increase as the link delays and packet loss rates get larger in the network.