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Despite the 4G LTE's 10X capacity improvement over 3G, mobile Web loading latency remains a major issue that hampers user experience. The root cause lies in the inefficient transport-layer that underutilizes LTE capacity, due to high channel dynamics, wireless link losses, and insufficient application traffic to propel the bandwidth probing. In this paper, we propose Cellular Link-Aware Web loading (CLAW), which boosts mobile Web loading using a physical-layer informed transport protocol. CLAW harnesses the limited PHY-layer statistics available on LTE phones to quantitatively model the LTE channel resource utilization, which is then translated into a transport window that best fits the bandwidth. Consequently, CLAW can estimate and fully utilize the available bandwidth almost within one RTT. In addition, CLAW can precisely differentiate LTE wireless loss from congestion loss, and identify the rare cases when the wireline backhaul becomes the bottleneck. We have prototyped CLAW on commodity LTE phones. Across a wide range of experimental settings, CLAW consistently reduces Web loading latency by more than 30%, compared to classical TCP variants and state-of-the-art congestion controls for cellular networks.
Xie et al. (Fri,) studied this question.