Receiver based management of low bandwidth access links

In this paper, we describe a receiver-based congestion control policy that leverages TCP flow control mechanisms to prioritize mixed traffic loads across access links. We manage queueing at the access link to: (1) improve the response time of interactive network applications; (2) reduce congestion-related packet losses; while (3) maintaining high throughput for bulk-transfer applications. Our policy controls queue length by manipulating receive socket buffer sizes. We have implemented this solution in a dynamically loadable Linux kernel module, and tested it over low-bandwidth links. Our approach yields a 7-fold improvement in packet latency over an unmodified system while maintaining 94% link utilization. In the common case, congestion-related packet losses at the access link can be eliminated. Finally, by prioritizing short flows, we show that our system reduces the time to download a complex Web page during a large background transfer by a factor of two.