The traditional slow-start mechanism in TCP can result in a slow ramping-up of the data delivery rate, inefficient bandwidth utilisation, and prolonged completion time for small-size flows, especially in networks with a large bandwidth-delay product (BDP). In this talk, I will present SUSS (Speeding Up Slow Start), a lightweight, sender-side add-on to the traditional slow-start mechanism. SUSS is designed to safely accelerate the growth of the congestion window when a flow is significantly below its optimal fair share of the available bandwidth. Our real-world experiments, conducted across various device types and network connections, consistently show that SUSS outperforms the traditional slow-start without any observed negative impacts. In all experiments with flow sizes under 5 MB and round-trip times (RTT) greater than 50 ms, SUSS achieves more than a 20% improvement in flow completion time.

SUSS is implemented in the Linux kernel (version 5.19.10). The source code, along with the installation guide, is available on GitHub at https://github.com/SUSSdeveloper/SUSS. This research has been presented at the SIGCOMM conference in 2024.

Haibo Zhang is an Associate Professor in the School of Computing at the University of Otago, New Zealand. He received his PhD from the University of Adelaide and completed his postdoctoral research at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden. His research interests include computer networks, high-performance computing, and applied machine learning. Haibo has published over 100 peer-reviewed papers, with many featured in prestigious conference proceedings such as SIGCOMM, INFOCOM, and ICAPS, as well as top-tier international journals such as IEEE and ACM Transactions. He has served as the program chair for 16 international conferences and currently serves as an associate editor for three international journals.