TCP Fast Recovery Strategies: Analysis and Improvements

This paper suggests that, to match an ideal Internet gateway which rigorously enforces fair sharing among competing TCP connections, an ideal TCP sender should possess two properties while obeying congestion avoidance and control principles. First, the TCP sender which under-uses network resources should avoid retransmission timeouts. When experiencing network congestion, a TCP connection should not time out unless it has already reduced its congestion window to one packet but still cannot survive. Second, the TCP sender which over-uses network resources should lower its bandwidth. The congestion window for a connection should decrease each time a lost packet is detected, because an ideal gateway will drop packets, during congestion, with a probability proportional to the bandwidth of the connection. Following these guidelines, we propose Network-sensitive Reno (Net Reno), a set of optimizations that can be added to a traditional Reno TCP sender. Using TCP's self-clocking propert...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1998
• Where: INFOCOM
• Authors: Dong Lin, H. T. Kung
• Keywords: Communications, Congestion Windows, INFOCOM 1998, Net Reno, TCP Sender