Layer 4 Accelerator (L4A) for Optimizing Network Protocol Latencies in Mobile Devices

Next Generation Networks (NGN) is attracting considerable research in recent times. The primary focus of NGN research work is towards improving the performance by reducing latency in the existing network, increasing peak throughput and improving spectral efficiencies. Even though fifth generation (5G) network standards set its requirement to lower the latency, the Internet protocol suite introduces significant delay in the network. For example, in a client server communication, before the client sends its first byte to the server, the time to complete the socket setup is affected by several connectivity overheads such as DNS lookup, TCP 3-way handshake and SSL/TLS certificate exchange. This affects the page loading and content downloading time, thereby impacting the user experience significantly. In this paper, we study all these connectivity overheads and propose a novel solution called Layer 4 Accelerator (L4A) to overcome the impact of these overheads. L4A is a light weight and client only solution which can be easily deployed across all mobile platforms. In this paper, we show that L4A, when implemented on commercially available devices such as Samsung Galaxy S7 and S8 running Android N, significantly improves application page loading time by 20% to 30% consistently.