Transformer-Based Multipath Congestion Control: A Decoupled Approach for Wireless Uplinks

TL;DR

This paper introduces TCCO, a Transformer-based framework for multipath congestion control that improves wireless uplink performance by leveraging external decision engines and self-attention mechanisms.

Contribution

It presents a decoupled architecture with a Transformer-based DRL agent for multipath congestion control, enhancing adaptability and performance in wireless networks.

Findings

TCCO outperforms existing baselines in simulated environments.

The framework maintains TCP/IP compatibility while improving control.

Extensive tests show TCCO's effectiveness on real Wi-Fi testbeds.

Abstract

The proliferation of artificial intelligence applications on edge devices necessitates efficient transport protocols that leverage multi-homed connectivity across heterogeneous networks. While Multipath TCP enables bandwidth aggregation, its in-kernel congestion control mechanisms lack the programmability and flexibility needed for achieving efficient transmission. Additionally, inherent measurement noise renders network state partially observable, challenging data-driven approaches like deep reinforcement learning (DRL). To address these challenges, we propose a Transformer-based Congestion Control Optimization (TCCO) framework for multipath transport. TCCO employs a decoupled architecture that offloads control decisions to an external decision engine via a lightweight in-kernel client and user-space proxy, enabling edge devices to leverage external computational resources while maintaining TCP/IP compatibility. The Transformer-based DRL agent in the external decision engine uses self-attention to capture temporal dependencies, filter noise, and coordinate control across subflows through a unified policy. Extensive evaluation on both simulated and real dual-band Wi-Fi testbeds demonstrates that TCCO achieves superior adaptability and performance than state-of-the-art baselines, validating the feasibility and effectiveness of TCCO for wireless networks.