Lifetime-based TCP service differentiation

We present a lifetime-based differentiation framework for TCP flows. The separation into two classes is based on a threshold technique. We introduce a scheme, FairShare, that handles the long-lived flows and achieves global max-min fairness. The short-lived flows are bundled together and a separate family of mechanisms, DAS, dynamically allocate bandwidth to match the load of newly instantiated short flows. Thus, two different objectives are met: fairness for the long flows, as well as reduced response times and reduced response time variance for the short flows. We argue that the applications are better served this way. Namely, applications generating short transfers are predominantly interested in short response times (e.g. HTTP requests/responses) while those generating long transfers (e.g. long FTP transfers) are at least provided a guarantee they are not penalized compared to other similar connections. By way of an example, we also demonstrate that elaborate traffic control schemes that do not perform classification of flows based on their anticipated lifetimes, may fail to efficiently utilize the network links.