Transport protocols for 5G mmWaveA seamless interaction between mmWave cellular networks and transport protocols (e.g., TCP) will be the key to fully exploit the resources available at mmWave frequencies. Most of the research on mmWave, however, has focused so far on the channel and the PHY and MAC layers. Therefore, the performance of transport protocols over this kind of links is still relatively unexplored.

In particular, mmWave links are characterized by wide variations in the offered rate with LOS/NLOS transitions. Moreover, the link may be in outage if all the reflections in NLOS are blocked, and packets may be lost. This motivates the introduction of link-layer retransmissions (time diversity), and large buffers to avoid packet losses. We showed that without retransmissions it is not possible to sustain a high TCP throughput in NLOS conditions. However, this also increases the end-to-end latency. Moreover, the undesired consequence is the emergence of the bufferbloat phenomenon, which has a negative impact on both the throughput and the latency. Finally, if there is an extended outage, the loss of multiple packets may trigger a retransmission timeout. In this case, we showed that state-of-the-art TCP congestion control algorithms may require a long time to reach full bandwidth utilization, thus wasting resources.

The performance of the end-to-end connection can be improved using path diversity with Multipath TCP (MP-TCP) on combined LTE and mmWave links. However, we showed that also in this case the available congestion control algorithms cannot fully exploit the resources available in the combined links. Moreover, the distance between the mobile user and the base station affects the choice of the best combination of paths. Indeed, at large distance it is better to couple a mmWave link with a reliable LTE sub-6 GHz link than with another mmWave link, despite the difference in bandwidths.

The use of cross-layer information is another promising approach. In fact, it makes it possible to break the abstract view that TCP has of the end-to-end connection. Moreover, it increases the responsiveness of the protocol to sudden changes in the link quality. We proposed a cross-layer congestion control algorithm (X-TCP) to improve the performance of TCP in uplink scenarios. X-TCP adapts the congestion window with information related to the mmWave channel, and showed a performance gain in both throughput and latency with respect to TCP CUBIC in randomly generated scenarios.

LIST OF RELATED PUBLICATIONS

Title DateArea
Matteo Drago, Michele Polese, Stepan Kucera, Dmitry Kozlov, Vitalii Kirillov, Michele Zorzi, QoS Provisioning in 60 GHz Communications by Physical and Transport Layer Coordination, IEEE 16th International Conference on Mobile Ad Hoc and Sensor Systems (MASS), Monterey, CA, USA, 2019
arXiv
2019/11Transport, Simulation
M. Giordani, A. Zanella, T. Higuchi, O. Altintas, M. Zorzi, S. Nakamura, “Enabling Technologies for Future Transportation Systems: an End-to-End Performance Evaluation”, 26th ITS World Congress , October 2019.2019/10Vehicular
Menglei Zhang, Michele Polese, Marco Mezzavilla, Jing Zhu, Sundeep Rangan, Shivendra Panwar, Michele Zorzi, "Will TCP work in mmWave 5G Cellular Networks?", submitted to IEEE Communications Magazine
arXiv
2018/06Transport
M. Drago, T. Azzino, M. Polese, C. Stefanovic, M. Zorzi, "Reliable Video Streaming over mmWave with Multi Connectivity and Network Coding", invited paper at ICNC 2018
arXiv

2018/03Transport
M. Polese, M. Mezzavilla, M. Zhang, J. Zhu, S. Rangan, S. Panwar, M. Zorzi, “milliProxy: a TCP Proxy Architecture for 5G mmWave Cellular Systems”, in Proceedings of the 51st Asilomar Conference on Signals, Systems and Computers, Asilomar, California, USA, 2017.
arXiv

2017/11Transport
M. Polese, M. Mezzavilla, S. Rangan, M. Zorzi, "Mobility Management for TCP in mmWave Networks", in Proceedings of the 1st ACM Workshop on Millimeter-Wave Networks and Sensing Systems 2017 (co-located with Mobicom 2017)
ACM
2017/10Transport, Mobility
M. Polese, M. Giordani, M. Mezzavilla, S. Rangan, and M. Zorzi, “Improved Handover Through Dual Connectivity in 5G mmWave Mobile Networks”, to appear on IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications (JSAC)
IEEE Xplore

arXiv
2017/09Mobility, Transport, Simulation
M. Polese, R. Jana, M. Zorzi, TCP and MP-TCP in 5G mmWave Networks, in IEEE Internet Computing, vol. 21, no. 5, pp. 12-19, 2017
IEEE Xplore
2017/09Transport
T. Azzino, M. Drago, M. Polese, A. Zanella, M. Zorzi, "X-TCP: A Cross Layer Approach for TCP Uplink Flows in mmWave Networks", accepted for presentation at the MedHocNet 2017
arXiv
2017/06Transport
M. Polese, R. Jana, M. Zorzi, “TCP in 5G mmWave Networks: Link Level Retransmissions and MP-TCP”, 2017 IEEE Conference on Computer Communications Workshops (INFOCOM WKSHPS)
arXiv
2017/05Transport
M. Zhang, M. Mezzavilla, R. Ford, S. Rangan, S. Panwar, E. Mellios, D. Kong, A. Nix, and M. Zorzi, "Transport layer performance in 5G mmWave cellular", 2016 IEEE Conference on Computer Communications Workshops (INFOCOM WKSHPS)
IEEE Xplore

arXiv
2016/04Transport