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The Impact of Background Network Traffic on Foreground Network Traffic
BibTeX
@MISC{Nychis_theimpact,
author = {George Nychis and Daniel R. Licata},
title = {The Impact of Background Network Traffic on Foreground Network Traffic},
year = {}
}
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Abstract
Abstract — We study the impact of background network traffic on foreground network traffic. Foreground applications, such as Web browsers, are those that require low latency for their network traffic, often because a user is actively waiting for the network’s response. Background applications, such as peer-topeer file sharing systems, are those that do not require fast responses to individual requests. Current foreground applications often do not, overall, transfer that much data, whereas current background applications are often more data-intensive. Thus, one would hope to provide low latency to foreground applications while simultaneously providing high bandwidth to background applications. In this paper, we show empirically that there are circumstances under which a current TCP implementation does not achieve this goal. In particular, we identify situations in which background traffic on a single machine increases the latency of foreground traffic on that same machine. We describe a study of the impact of various sources of background traffic on hosts of varying connection speeds; in our results, background traffic is problematic when and only when it saturates a host’s upstream (sending) link. I.
Keyphrases
background network traffic foreground network traffic background traffic low latency current foreground application much data high bandwidth network traffic peer-topeer file current tcp implementation background application fast response host upstream various source whereas current background application single machine network response individual request connection speed foreground application foreground traffic web browser
