Preferential treatment for short flows to reduce web latency

In this paper, we propose SFD algorithm to reduce the user-perceived web latency. This algorithm gives short flows preferential treatment. We implement SFD algorithm as a simple differentiated services policy and evaluate its performance in simulation. We find that SFD algorithm reduces the transmission latency of short flows and the response time to retrieve representative web pages by about 30%. Using web traces, we demonstrate that 99% web pages would be transferred faster. SFD penalizes long flows, but the penalty is well bounded. We further evaluate how different schemes trade-off the performance between short and long flows.