A study on the benefit of TCP packet prioritisation

Abstract

This paper studies and analyses the benefits of favouring the transfer of packets of a TCP flow over a best-effort network. Specifically, we aim at studying whether we could improve the pace of short data request, such as HTTP request, by giving a high priority to TCP packets that are not previously enqueued inside a core router. Following the idea that long-lived TCP flows greatly increase the routing queue delay, the motivation of this work is to minimise the impact in terms of delay, introduced by long-lived TCP flows over short TCP flows. Thus, this forwarding scheme avoids to delay packets that do not be- long to a flow already enqueued inside a router in order to avoid delay penalty to short flow. We define metrics to study the behaviour of such forwarding scheme and run several experiments over a complex and realistic topology. The results obtained present interesting and unexpected property of this forwarding scheme where not only short TCP o flows take benefit of such routing mechanism.