Supporting Delay-Sensitive Applications with Multipath QUIC and Forward Erasure Correction

Abstract

Recent developments in the Internet infrastructure have enabled new classes of real-time applications that strictly require low end-to-end data delivery latency. While many radio technologies offer millisecond-grade transmission latency, guaranteeing sub-second application-level delays is still a challenging goal. Conventional delay-sensitive applications do not use reliable network transport protocols to avoid packet loss recovery delay, especially in loss-prone environments such as wireless networks. QUIC is a UDP-based transport protocol with many TCP-like features, designed to reduce connection and transport latency. With the additional support of multipath transmission and packet-level Forward Erasure Correction (FEC), QUIC has the potential to provide reliable connections for latency-sensitive applications. In this work, we introduce DIOD (\underlineD elay-based \underlineI n-\underlineO rder \underlineD ecode) - - a multipath scheduler designed to work alongside FEC to minimize MPQUIC's application-level latency. An FEC adaptation scheme is also proposed to support the schedulers in dynamic environments. Our solution is evaluated with a synthetic traffic generator and a live video streaming application in emulated networks with correlated and uncorrelated loss models. Our experimental results show its significant latency reduction, especially when the traffic pattern is similar to that of real-time applications.