Herding the FLOQ: Flow Optimised Queueing

Photo by Nick Fewings on Unsplash

Abstract

“With more and more people working remotely, the demands placed on network operators to deliver high quality Internet connectivity to users is at an all time high. This is especially true for web page responsiveness, a human-centric activity. Several approaches try to ensure such 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 work addressing packet loss concerns the active management of within network middleboxes, however, these approaches 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 the number of lost packets during connection establishments 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% and improving TCP throughput by up to 20% and decreasing UDP packet loss by up to 23%. "

Publication
The 21st International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) Networking 2022

This work was part of Mihail’s internship under me at the Rakuten Mobile Innovation Studio.