Pstream: Priority-Based Stream Scheduling For Heterogeneous Paths In Multipath-Quic

Web latency remains the main obstacle to improving user experience with the continuous development of the web. A lot of works have been made in this course. Quick UDP Internet Connection (QUIC) embeds stream multiplexing to solve the head-of-line blocking caused by the in-order requirement of TCP. Multipath-QUIC (MPQUIC) brings further improvements by utilizing multiple paths, as is done in MultiPath TCP (MPTCP). Different from MPTCP schedulers, MPQUIC schedulers are stream-aware and thus can provide finer granularity of multipath scheduling. As streams are with different features based on their contents, the resource preferences of a stream are highly related to its feature. We find that scheduling without the recognition of the stream features can aggravate inter-stream blocking when sharing paths. We fill this gap and propose PStream - a priority-based online stream scheduling mechanism for MPQUIC, which performs path scheduling based on the stream features. We examine the effectiveness of PStream under different path heterogeneity comparing to the original and the latest scheduler of MPQUIC. Our evaluation shows that our scheduler can reduce up to 25.4% of page load time in high path heterogeneity.