[e2e] paper on TCP and packet reordering

[Mark Allman]

[Appologies if you see this announcement more than once.]
 
Folks-

Ethan Blanton and I have just finished up a paper on TCP's
performance in the face of packet reordering and what might be done
about the performance degradation.  The paper is now available if
anyone is interested.

    Ethan Blanton, Mark Allman. On Making TCP More Robust to Packet 
    Reordering. ACM Computer Communication Review, 32(1), January
    2002.
    http://roland.grc.nasa.gov/~mallman/papers/tcp-reorder-ccr.ps

Abstract:

    Previous research indicates that packet reordering is not a rare
    event on some Internet paths.  Reordering can cause performance
    problems for TCP's fast retransmission algorithm, which uses the
    arrival of duplicate acknowledgments to detect segment loss.
    Duplicate acknowledgments can be caused by the loss of a segment
    or by the reordering of segments by the network.  In this paper we
    illustrate the impact of reordering on TCP performance.  In
    addition, we show the performance of a conservative approach to
    ``undo'' the congestion control state changes made in conjunction
    with spurious retransmissions.  Finally, we propose several
    alternatives to dynamically make the fast retransmission algorithm
    more tolerant of the reordering observed in the network and assess
    these algorithms.

We'd be happy to hear any comments you might have.

allman


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Mark Allman -- BBN/NASA GRC -- http://roland.grc.nasa.gov/~mallman/