Flexible Priority-based Stream Schedulers in QUIC

The advent of mobile technologies has led to the development of novel services for end-users, with stringent needs and requirements. In the scope of 5G and Beyond 5G systems, non-terrestrial networks are being considered to meet such demands, with special emphasis on high-speed communications and low latency. QUIC is a new transport protocol designed to reduce communications latency in many ways. Among other features, it enables the use of multiple streams to effectively manage data flows sent through its underlying UDP socket. This paper introduces an implementation of priority-based stream schedulers along with the design of a flexible interface. Exploiting the proposed approach, applications are able to set the required scheduling scheme, as well as the stream priorities. The feasibility of the proposed approach is validated through an extensive experiment campaign, which combines Docker containers and the ns-3 simulator to emulate different connectivity characteristics. The results evince that an appropriate stream scheduler can indeed yield lower delays for strict time-sensitive applications by up to 36% under unreliable conditions.