Enhancing End-to-End Transport with Packet Trimming

Abstract

A new transport protocol is introduced to increase the responsiveness of the network to congestion. The new transport protocol, QUCO, reacts to congestion by selectively dropping off parts of a payload packet (combined with mitigation mechanisms to handle the loss of part of the payload). This packet trimming scheme greatly reduces the variations in the number of the packets going through the network. This allows to set tighter targets on the number of packets in flight and on the depth of the switch buffers. QUCO has less delay and much less delay variations than TCP. The resulting reduction in jitter is extremely useful, especially for media distribution.