Connection management for QoS service on the Web

The current Web service model treats all requests equivalently, both while being processed by servers and while being transmitted over the network. For some uses, such as multiple priority schemes, different levels of service are desirable. We propose application-level TCP connection management mechanisms for Web servers to provide two different levels of Web service, high and low service, by setting different time-outs for inactive TCP connections. We evaluated the performance of the mechanism under heavy and light loading conditions on the Web server. Our experiments show that, though heavy traffic saturates the network, high level class performance is improved by as much as 25-28%. Therefore, this mechanism can effectively provide QoS guaranteed services even in the absence of operating system and network support. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.