5G user satisfaction enabled by FASP : Evaluating the performance of Aspera's FASP

Abstract: With Ericsson’s goal to have optimal user experience at 5G’s 2020 release, it is very important to optimize transport protocols and techniques to manage the increasing amount of data traffic. Additionally, it will be important to manage handovers between very high speed 5G networks and older networks. Today most of the traffic is video on demand and the amount of this kind of traffic is expected to increase. Moreover, the current amount of data traffic will increase by an order of magnitude over the next few years. This thesis focuses on radio access networks and the difficulties they face in delivering high speed data traffic. This thesis analyzes one of the most used TCP protocols, CUBIC, as well as a new transport protocol developed by Aspera, called the Fast and Secure Protocol. Aspera’s FASP is a new transport protocol that promises full link utilization. FASP is built upon UDP and uses advanced round trip time measurements and queuing delay to detect the available bandwidth between two communicating hosts. This thesis project also provides methods to realize experiments to assess the limitations of transport protocols. These experiments are conducted in an environment that resembles the upcoming 5G radio access network. Results have shown that both delay and packet loss affect TCP more than we expected and that high packet loss is devastating. In contrast, Aspera’s FASP is very resistant to both delay and packet loss. These results and analysis provide a foundation upon which others can build.