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

—This paper presents and analyses the implementation of a novel active queue management (AQM) named FavourQueue that aims to improve delay transfer of short lived TCP flows over a best-effort network. The idea is to dequeue in first packets that do not belong to a flow previously enqueued. 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 FavourQueue does not only improve the performance of short TCP traffic but also improve the performance of all TCP traffic in terms of drop ratio and latency whatever the flow size. In particular, we demonstrate that FavourQueue reduces the loss of a retransmitted packet, decrease the RTO recovery ratio and improves the latency up to 30% compared to DropTail.