End-to-end congestion control approaches for high throughput and low delay in 4G/5G cellular networks

Abstract Cellular networks have evolved to support high peak bitrates with low loss rates as observed by the higher layers. However, applications and services running over cellular networks are now facing other difficult congestion-related challenges, most notably a highly variable link capacity and bufferbloat. To overcome these issues and improve performance of network traffic in 4G/5G cellular networks, a number of in-network and end-to-end solutions have been proposed. Fairness between interacting congestion control algorithms (CCAs) has played an important role in the type of CCAs considered for research and deployment. The placement of content closer to the user and the allocation of per-user queues in cellular networks has increased the likelihood of a cellular access bottleneck and reduced the extent of flow interaction between multiple users. This has resulted in renewed interest in end-to-end CCAs for cellular networks by opening up room for research and exploration. In this work, we present end-to-end CCAs that target a high throughput and a low latency over highly variable network links, and classify them according to the way they address the congestion control. The work also discusses the deployability of the algorithms. In addition, we provide insights into possible future research directions, such as coping with a higher degree of variability, interaction of CCAs in a shared bottleneck, and avenues for synergized research, such as CCAs assisted by software defined networking and network function virtualization. We hope that this work will serve as a starting point for systematically navigating through the expanding number of cellular CCAs. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first paper that surveys and classifies CCAs for 4G/5G cellular networks.