Transition from Heavy to Light Tails in Retransmission Durations

— Retransmissions serve as the basic building block that communication protocols use to achieve reliable data transfer. Until recently, the number of retransmissions were thought to follow a light tailed (in particular, a geometric) distribution. However, recent work seems to suggest that when the distribution of the packets have infinite support, retransmission-based protocols may result in heavy tailed delays and even possibly zero throughput. While this result is true even when the distribution of packet sizes are light-tailed, it requires the assumption that the packet sizes have infinite support. However, in reality, packet sizes are often bounded by the Maximum Transmission Unit (MTU), and thus the aforementioned result merits a deeper investigation. To that end, in this paper, we allow the distribution of the packet size L to have finite support. This packet is sent over an on-off channel {(Ai, Ui)} with alternating available Ai and unavailable Ui periods. If L ≥ Ai, the ...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: INFOCOM
• Authors: Jian Tan, Ness B. Shroff
• Keywords: Communications, INFOCOM 2010, Law Main Body, Packet Size, Power Law