FavourQueue: a Parameterless Active Queue Management to Speed Up Short TCP Flows (and others too!)

TL;DR

FavorQueue is a novel parameterless active queue management scheme that prioritizes short TCP flows, reducing delays and packet loss, and improving overall network performance without requiring additional configuration.

Contribution

This paper introduces FavorQueue, a new AQM that enhances short TCP flow performance and overall network efficiency by prioritizing packets without needing parameter tuning.

Findings

Reduces latency of short TCP flows by up to 30%

Decreases packet loss and retransmission rates

Improves overall TCP traffic performance across flow sizes

Abstract

This paper presents and analyses the implementation of a novel active queue management (AQM) named FavorQueue that aims to improve delay transfer of short lived TCP flows over best-effort networks. The idea is to dequeue packets that do not belong to a flow previously enqueued first. The rationale is to mitigate the delay induced by long-lived TCP flows over the pace of short TCP data requests and to prevent dropped packets at the beginning of a connection and during recovery period. Although the main target of this AQM is to accelerate short TCP traffic, we show that FavorQueue does not only improve the performance of short TCP traffic but also improves the performance of all TCP traffic in terms of drop ratio and latency whatever the flow size. In particular, we demonstrate that FavorQueue reduces the loss of a retransmitted packet, decreases the number of dropped packets recovered by RTO and improves the latency up to 30% compared to DropTail. Finally, we show that this scheme remains compliant with recent TCP updates such as the increase of the initial slow-start value.