Two schemes to reduce latency in short lived TCP flows

Motivated by the amount of short-lived TCP traffic due to interactive applications like Web browsing, we propose two schemes to reduce the download time of TCP flows. Both schemes explicitly try to overcome the long delay suffered when TCP has to recover from the loss of the last data segment in a flow, loss for which fast retransmit cannot be triggered. The first scheme consists in transmitting twice the last segment, while the second one exploits the reception of the duplicate ACK caused by the delivery of the FIN segment. Both schemes allow the transmitter to recover the loss without waiting for a retransmission timeout expiration, thus providing quicker recovery with up to 50% gain.