TAQ: Enhancing Fairness and Performance Predictability in Small Packet Regimes

TAQ: Enhancing Fairness and Performance Predictability in Small Packet Regimes, Chen, J., Subramanian, L., Iyengar, J., & Ford, B. (2014, April). In Proceedings of the Ninth European Conference on Computer Systems, (p. 7). ACM.

TCP congestion control algorithms implicitly assume that the per-flow throughput is at least a few packets per round trip time. Environments where this assumption does not hold, which we refer to as small packet regimes, are common in the contexts of wired and cellular networks in developing regions. In this paper we show that in small packet regimes TCP flows experience server unfairness, high packet loss rates, and flow silences due to repetitive timeouts…we propose Timeout Aware Queuing (TAQ), a readily deployable in-network middle box approach that users a multi-level adaptive priority queuing algorithm to reduce the probability of timeouts…

Read full article