Reducing Mobile Web Latency Through Adaptively Selecting Transport Protocol

To improve the performance of mobile web services, a new transport protocol, QUIC, has been recently proposed as a substitute for TCP. However, with pros and cons of QUIC, it is challenging to decide whether and when to use QUIC in large-scale real-world mobile web services. Complex temporal correlation of network conditions, high user heterogeneity in a nationwide deployment, implementation diversity of QUIC variants limited, and resources on mobile devices all affect the selection of transport protocols. In this paper, we present WiseTrans, an adaptive transport protocol selection mechanism, to switch transport protocols for mobile web services online and improve the completion time of web requests. WiseTrans introduces machine learning techniques to deal with temporal heterogeneity, makes decisions with historical information to handle spatial heterogeneity, adopts an online learning method to keep pace with implementation variation, and switches transport protocols at the request level to reach high performance with acceptable overhead. We implement WiseTrans on two platforms (Android and iOS) in a popular mobile web service application of Baidu. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that WiseTrans can reduce request completion time by up to 25.8% on average compared to the usage of a single protocol.