Abstract
High-speed rail (HSR) systems potentially provide a more efficient way of door-to-door transportation than airplane. However, they also pose unprecedented challenges in delivering seamless Internet service for on-board passengers. In this paper, we conduct a large-scale active-passive measurement study of TCP performance over LTE on HSR. Our measurement targets the HSR routes in China operating at above 300 km/h. We performed extensive data collection through both controlled setting and passive monitoring, obtaining 1732.9 GB data collected over 135719 km of trips. Leveraging such a unique dataset, we measure important performance metrics such as TCP goodput, latency, loss rate, as well as key characteristics of TCP flows, application breakdown, and users' behaviors. We further quantitatively study the impact of frequent cellular handover on HSR networking performance, and conduct in-depth examination of the performance of two widely deployed transport-layer protocols: TCP CUBIC and TCP BBR. Our findings reveal the performance of today's commercial HSR networks “in the wild”, as well as identify several performance inefficiencies, which motivate us to design a simple yet effective congestion control algorithm based on BBR to further boost the throughput by up to 36.5%. They together highlight the need to develop dedicated protocol mechanisms that are friendly to extreme mobility.
Original language | English (US) |
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Title of host publication | MobiCom 2019 - Proceedings of the 25th Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking |
Publisher | Association for Computing Machinery |
ISBN (Electronic) | 9781450361699 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Aug 7 2019 |
Event | 25th Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking, MobiCom 2019 - Los Cabos, Mexico Duration: Oct 21 2019 → Oct 25 2019 |
Publication series
Name | Proceedings of the Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking, MOBICOM |
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Conference
Conference | 25th Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking, MobiCom 2019 |
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Country/Territory | Mexico |
City | Los Cabos |
Period | 10/21/19 → 10/25/19 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:We are grateful to the reviewers and our shepherd, Dr. Matt Welsh in particular, for their constructive critique and comments, all of which have helped us greatly improve this paper. This work is supported in part by National Key Research and Development Plan, China (Grant No. 2016YFB1001200), National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 61802007 and 61672499) and Science and Technology Innovation Project of Foshan City, China (Grant No. 2015IT100095).
Publisher Copyright:
© 2019 Association for Computing Machinery.
Keywords
- BBR
- CUBIC
- Handover
- High Mobility
- High-speed Rails
- LTE
- Measurement
- TCP