Socket Intents: OS Support for Using Multiple Access Networks and its Benefits for Web Browsing

TL;DR

This paper introduces Socket Intents, an OS-level approach allowing applications to specify communication preferences, enabling smarter multi-network usage for web browsing, resulting in significant performance improvements in diverse network scenarios.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel OS support mechanism called Socket Intents that enables applications to communicate their network preferences for better multi-access network management.

Findings

Performance benefits in over 50% of cases

Speedups of more than two times in 20% of cases

Feasibility demonstrated with prototype and simulations

Abstract

In today's Internet, mobile devices are connected to multiple access networks, e.g., WiFi/DSL and LTE. To take advantage of the networks' diverse paths characteristics (delay, bandwidth, and reliability) and aggregate bandwidth, we need smart strategies for choosing which interface(s) to use for what traffic. In this paper, we present an approach how to tackle this challenge as part of the Operating System (OS): With the concept of Socket Intents, applications can express what they know about their communication pattern and their preferences. Using our Socket Intents Prototype and our modified BSD Socket Interface, this information is used to choose the most appropriate path or path combination on a per message or per connection basis. We evaluate our system based on the use case of Web browsing: Using our prototype and a client-side proxy, we show the feasibility and benefits of our design. Using a flow-based simulator and a full factorial experimental design, we study a broad range of access network combinations (based on typical DSL and LTE scenarios) and real workloads (Alexa Top 100 and Top 1000 Web Sites). Our policies achieve performance benefits in more than 50% of the cases and speedups of more than factor two in 20% of the cases without adding overhead in the other cases.