ZEUS: An Experimental Toolkit for Evaluating Congestion Control Algorithms in 5G Environments

TL;DR

This paper introduces Zeus, an open-source 5G network emulation platform, to evaluate congestion control algorithms, revealing their performance challenges and impact on cross traffic in diverse 5G conditions.

Contribution

Zeus provides a simple, accessible, and reproducible testbed for evaluating congestion control algorithms in 5G environments, addressing a key gap in current testing tools.

Findings

Existing algorithms struggle to perform well in highly variable 5G channels.

Zeus enables consistent testing of congestion control algorithms in 5G.

Harm metric reveals significant detriment to TCP Cubic in 5G environments.

Abstract

As global cellular networks converge to 5G, one question lingers: Are we ready for the 5G challenge? A growing concern surrounds how well do existing congestion control algorithms perform in diverse 5G networks. Given that 5G networks are not yet widely deployed, assessing the performance of existing congestion control algorithms in realistic 5G settings presents several challenges. Moreover, existing network simulation and emulation environments are also not ideally suited to address the unique challenges of 5G network environments. Therefore, building a simple and easily accessible platform becomes crucial to allow testing and comparison of congestion control algorithms under different testing conditions. This paper makes two main contributions. First, we present Zeus, an open-source testbed that emulates 5G channels to evaluate congestion control algorithms in a repeatable and reproducible manner. Second, we assess and characterize ten of today's state-of-the-art congestion control algorithms under different 5G environments and show the difficulties of these solutions to achieve high performance under highly varying 5G channel conditions. In addition, we also utilize the recently proposed harm metric to characterize the detriment done by such algorithms to TCP Cubic cross traffic in 5G environments.