A Case for CATS: A Conductor-driven Asymmetric Transport Scheme for Semantic Prioritization
Abstract
Standard transport protocols like TCP operate as a blind, FIFO conveyor belt for data, a model that is increasingly suboptimal for latency-sensitive and interactive applications. This paper challenges this model by introducing CATS (Conductor-driven Asymmetric Transport Scheme), a framework that provides TCP with the semantic awareness necessary to prioritize critical content. By centralizing scheduling intelligence in a transport-native "Conductor", CATS significantly improves user-perceived performance by delivering essential data first. This architecture directly confronts a cascade of historical performance workarounds and their limitations, including the high overhead of parallel connections in HTTP/1.1, the transport-layer Head-of-Line blocking in HTTP/2, and the observed implementation heterogeneity of prioritization in HTTP/3 over QUIC. Built upon TCP BBR, our ns-3 implementation demonstrates this principle by reducing the First Contentful Paint by over 78% in a representative webpage download configured as a deliberate worst-case scenario, with no penalty to total page load time compared to the baseline.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2603.13945,
title = {A Case for CATS: A Conductor-driven Asymmetric Transport Scheme for Semantic Prioritization},
author = {Syed Muhammad Aqdas Rizvi},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2603.13945},
year = {2026}
}
Comments
Extended version. Contains additional mathematical formalization of the deadlock resolution constraint, detailed ns-3 simulation parameters, and further details on possible future work and extensions not present in the IEEE conference proceedings. 7 pages, 3 figures, 2 tables. Code available at https://github.com/smarizvi110/cats