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.