Throughput Estimation for Short Lived TCP Cubic Flows

Mobile devices are increasingly becoming the dominant device for Internet access. The network throughput achieved by a mobile device directly affects the performance and user experience. Throughput measurement techniques thus play an important role in predicting expected performance. Measurement techniques that require the transfer of large amounts of data can provide higher accuracy but incur large overhead. Further, since most mobile cellular plans impose usage quota, the overhead of such measurements over cellular networks can become quite high. Smaller data transfers have also been used to measure the throughput. Due to the conservative TCP slow start behaviour, however, these measurements often underestimate the achievable throughput. Considering these weaknesses in existing throughput measurement techniques, we propose a throughput estimation technique for TCP Cubic that uses 1 MB of data transfer to predict the throughput for prevalent large transfer sizes in mobile traffic such as 5 MB, 10 MB and 20 MB. Our evaluation shows that our approach can achieve high accuracy with low overhead, in predicting the achievable throughput.