Super Fast Retransmit: A Proposal to Improve the Performance of Short-Lived TCP Connections |
This paper presents a method of improving the performance of TCP (Transfer Command Protocol) based short-lived connections, such as web transfers. This paper presents the methods used to examine the characteristics experienced while communicating with a number of Internet sites, and finds that constancy in the RTT (Round Trip Time) and throughput can be observed for periods extending to a number of days. The research identified a temporal correlation between the three-way handshake and subsequent measurements of the RTT; by using this correlation, the algorithm is able to detect the signs of a packet loss and retransmit the affected segment before a standard implementation of TCP is able to recover the lost segment. Following the proposal of the algorithm, simulations were performed to study the performance of the proposed algorithm. In summary, it was found that use of the Super Fast Retransmit algorithm provided enhanced performance showing the average duration of a connection was at least 8% lower compared to TCP Reno.
Tarr AJ, Ghita BV