Improving the Start-Up Behavior of a Congestion Control Scheme for TCP

Based on experiments conducted in a network simulator and over real networks, this paper proposes changes to the congestion control scheme in current TCP implementations to improve its behavior during the start-up period of a TCP connection. The scheme, which includes Slow-start, Fast Retransmit, and Fast Recovery algorithms, uses acknowledgments from a receiver to dynamically calculate reasonable operating values for a sender's TCP parameters governing when and how much a sender can pump into the network. During the startup period, because a TCP sender starts with default parameters, it often ends up sending too many packets and too fast, leading to multiple losses of packets from the same window. This paper shows that recovery from losses during this start-up period is often unnecessarily time-consuming. In particular, using the current Fast Retransmit algorithm, when multiple packets in the same window are lost, only one of the packet losses may be recovered by each Fast Retra...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1996
• Where: SIGCOMM
• Authors: Janey C. Hoe
• Keywords: Communications, Fast Retransmit, Paper Proposes Changes, SIGCOMM 1996, Start-up Period