Traffic behaviour of interactive time-dependent thin streams on the modern Internet

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Our current Internet systems was built to boost throughput, maximising efficiency for applications trying to move a lot of data. A large class of applications, however, does not produce large amounts of data. They send data when an action is performed or a short control message is to be conveyed. Such applications are very often time-dependent and/or interactive and very often produce what we call thin streams: Data flows with high interarrival time between packets and small packet sizes. Since the focus on network development has been on maximising throughput, the underlying network systems of the Internet is currently optimised for greedy streams: flows trying to send as much data as possible having large packet sizes and short interarrival times betwe en packets. In this process, latency has gradually been traded off for incremental increases in throughput. Thin streams are especially vulnerable to this tradeoff since: 1) the transmission patterns deviate from what the network is optimised for, 2) the y represent interactive and/or time-dependent applications whose quality of experience will quickly degrade, even with small increases in experienced latency. The TimeIn project aims to locate the sources of increased latency in thin-stream traffic and d evelop mechanisms that will reduce the experienced latency without having to change the basic infrastructure upon which the Internet is currently built.