A Project to Improve Internet User Experience
25/02/2021

Argentina’s University of Palermo is working on an initiative to optimize latency and therefore improve Internet user experience.
Its technical innovation led this project to be selected as one of the winners of the grants offered by LACNIC’s FRIDA Program. The funds will be used to train and incorporate new researchers for the purpose of expanding the team’s ability to explore different alternatives and development opportunities. “The grant is a great motivator for participants, as it expands the project’s visibility and effect of their results,” noted Alejandro Popovsky, Dean of Engineering at the University of Palermo.
Why is optimizing latency important?
In general, the quality of an Internet service is associated with the bandwidth it offers and the overbooking of infrastructure by the provider, which determines the probability that a customer will reach the nominal bandwidth most of the time.
However, the quality of many services does not depend on the available bandwidth, as these services do not require the transmission of large amounts of information, but rather depend on the rapid response to the user’s request. In this case, latency is the most important factor affecting the perceived quality of the service.
The Internet is an example of this. Web pages are made up of dozens and sometimes hundreds of objects such as graphics which are downloaded separately. Each of these objects is a transaction against the web server, which means that a high latency is multiplied by the number of objects. This, in turn, results in very long download times for the page.
What can you tell us about the project by University of Palermo to develop an algorithm to improve latency?
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In transactional communications, latency has two main components: server latency and network latency. In turn, network latency includes a component caused by the finite speed at which wires can transport information, plus a second component due to the time that data packets spend in output router queues. The latter is known as queuing delay.
Queuing delay generally accounts for the greater part of network latency and is caused by the TCP congestion control algorithm, which traditionally only seeks to optimize two goals: decreasing packet losses and maximizing throughput.
Because it only considers the two goals above, the TCP congestion control algorithm neglects two other, also very important goals: minimizing latency and the fair distribution of available capacity among connections that share network resources. The problem caused by traditional congestion control algorithms is often called bufferbloat, as they flood network device output buffers with packets.