Responding to Spurious Timeouts in TCP
Andrei Gurtov
Reiner Ludwig
In Proceedings of IEEE Infocom'03, March 2003.
[Full Text in PDF Format, 383KB]
Abstract
Delays on Internet paths, especially including wireless
links, can be highly variable. On the other hand, a current trend for
modern TCPs is to deploy a fine-grain retransmission timer with a
lower minimum timeout value than 1 s suggested by RFC2988. Spurious
TCP timeouts cause unnecessary retransmissions and congestion
control back-off. The Eifel algorithm detects spurious TCP
timeouts and recovers by restoring the connection state saved before
the timeout. This paper presents an enhanced version of the
Eifel response to spurious timeouts and illustrates its performance
benefits on paths with a high delay-bandwidth product. The refinements
concern the following issues (1) an efficient operation in
presence of packet losses (2) appropriate restoration of congestion
control, and (3) adapting the retransmit timer to avoid further spurious
timeouts. In our simulations the Eifel algorithm on paths with
a high delay-bandwidth product can increase throughput by up to
250% and at the same decrease the load on the network by 3%. The
proposed response also shows adequate performance on heavily
congested paths.