Accelerating Mobile Applications with Parallel High-bandwidth and Low-latency Channels

Interactive mobile applications like web browsing and gaming are known to benefit significantly from low latency networking, as applications communicate with cloud servers and other users' devices. Emerging mobile channel standards have not met these needs: general-purpose channels are greatly improving bandwidth but empirically offer little improvement for common latency-sensitive applications, and ultra-low-latency channels are targeted at only specific applications with very low bandwidth requirements. We explore a different direction for wireless channel design: utilizing two channels-one high bandwidth, one low latency-simultaneously for general-purpose applications. With a focus on web browsing, we design fine-grained traffic steering heuristics that can be implemented in a shim layer of the host network stack, effectively exploiting the high bandwidth and low latency properties of both channels. In the special case of 5G's channels, our experiments show that even though URLLC offers just 0.2% of the bandwidth of eMBB, the use of both channels in parallel can reduce page load time by 26% to 59% compared to delivering traffic exclusively on eMBB. We believe this approach may benefit applications in addition to web browsing, may offer service providers incentives to deploy low latency channels, and suggests a direction for the design of future wireless channels.