Improving round-trip time estimates in reliable transport protocols

Abstract

As a reliable, end-to-end transport protocol, the ARPA Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) uses positive acknowledgements and retransmission to guarantee delivery. TCP implementations are expected to measure and adapt to changing network propagation delays so that its retransmission behavior balances user throughput and network efficiency. However, TCP suffers from a problem we call retransmission ambiguity: when an acknowledgment arrives for a segment that has been retransmitted, there is no indication which transmission is being acknowledged. Many existing TCP implementations do not handle this problem correctly. This paper reviews the various approaches to retransmission and presents a novel and effective approach to the retransmission ambiguity problem.