Favoring the short

The notion of flow rate fairness and TCP-friendliness is dominating the current design of transport protocols. Yet, it can be, and has been, argued that value in networks and applications often comes from other factors than simple bandwidth fairness. For example, web pages are mostly in the range of few hundred kilobytes and the utility of web sites are tied to how responsive they are, while streaming services and bulk data transfer can consume all available bandwidth for extensive amounts of time. This paper describes our initial work on a flow-length dependent congestion control to TCP. It attempts to reduce the transmission time and also energy cost incurred by wireless devices by allowing shorter flows (measured in bytes) to finish faster in the network. We show that our initial concept can deliver data almost twice as fast as standard TCP without causing significant disadvantage to the longer flows.