A Stream-Aware Multipath QUIC Scheduler for Heterogeneous Paths: Paper # XXX, XXX pages.

Multipath communication is an attractive solution to the increasing need for improving web performance, by allowing devices to aggregate the capacity of different network paths, which can thus lead to lower latencies. However, path asymmetry is known to incur performance issues for multipath transport protocols, such as head-of-line blocking (HoLB), as well as other issues. We propose a proof-of-concept algorithm for a stream-aware packet scheduler for Multipath QUIC, called Stream-Aware Earliest Completion First (SA-ECF). SA-ECF schedules the sending of stream data so that the completion of individual streams are not delayed by slower paths, while providing a fair allocation of the aggregated bandwidth based on stream priority information from HTTP/2. We compare the performance of SA-ECF with other packet schedulers for MPQUIC using measurements from a virtualized testbed. Our results show that SA-ECF is able to handle path heterogeneity well, and can provide lower stream completion times than non stream-aware schedulers.