Improving latency for interactive, thin-stream applications by multiplexing streams over TCP
Chris Carlmar · NORA - Norwegian Open Research Archives · 2011
Many applications use TCP on the Internet today. For applications that produce data all the time, loss is handled satisfactorily. But, for interactive applications, with low rate of data production, the loss of a single packet can mean huge delays. We have implemented and tested a system to reduce the latency of an interactive TCP application server with many clients. This system multiplexes the streams, to clients in the same region, through a regional proxy, which then sends the streams to their destination. This increases the chance of triggering the TCP mechanism fast retransmit, when a packet is lost, thus reducing the latency caused by retransmissions.