Herding the FLOQ: Flow Optimised Queueing

With more people working remotely, the demands placed on network operators to deliver high quality connectivity to users is at an all time high. This is especially true for web page responsiveness, a human-centric activity. Several approaches strive to ensure high quality of service (QoS) from within the browser or in-network caching, however, they do not target a core culprit of low QoS: initial packet loss in connection establishment. Existing works address packet loss via the active management of packet flows within network middleboxes, however, they do not address this specific type of packet loss directly. This work introduces a new active queue management algorithm: FLow Optimised Queueing (FLOQ). FLOQ is designed to decrease packet loss during connection establishment without affecting overall network performance. Through experimental comparison with other AQM algorithms, our preliminary results show that FLOQ solves this problem, speeding up request completion times by up to 70%, improving TCP throughput by up to 20%, and decreasing UDP packet loss by up to 23%.