Network Working Group                                          M. Allman
Request for Comments: 3390                                  BBN/NASA GRC
Obsoletes: 2414                                                 S. Floyd
Updates: 2581                                                       ICIR
Category: Standards Track                                   C. Partridge
                                                       BBN Technologies
                                                           October 2002


                   Increasing TCP's Initial Window

Status of this Memo

  This document specifies an Internet standards track protocol for the
  Internet community, and requests discussion and suggestions for
  improvements.  Please refer to the current edition of the "Internet
  Official Protocol Standards" (STD 1) for the standardization state
  and status of this protocol.  Distribution of this memo is unlimited.

Copyright Notice

  Copyright (C) The Internet Society (2002).  All Rights Reserved.

Abstract

  This document specifies an optional standard for TCP to increase the
  permitted initial window from one or two segment(s) to roughly 4K
  bytes, replacing RFC 2414.  It discusses the advantages and
  disadvantages of the higher initial window, and includes discussion
  of experiments and simulations showing that the higher initial window
  does not lead to congestion collapse.  Finally, this document
  provides guidance on implementation issues.

Terminology

  The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT",
  "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and "OPTIONAL" in this
  document are to be interpreted as described in RFC 2119 [RFC2119].

1.  TCP Modification

  This document obsoletes [RFC2414] and updates [RFC2581] and specifies
  an increase in the permitted upper bound for TCP's initial window
  from one or two segment(s) to between two and four segments.  In most
  cases, this change results in an upper bound on the initial window of
  roughly 4K bytes (although given a large segment size, the permitted
  initial window of two segments may be significantly larger than 4K
  bytes).



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RFC 3390            Increasing TCP's Initial Window         October 2002


  The upper bound for the initial window is given more precisely in
  (1):

        min (4*MSS, max (2*MSS, 4380 bytes))                        (1)

  Note: Sending a 1500 byte packet indicates a maximum segment size
  (MSS) of 1460 bytes (assuming no IP or TCP options).  Therefore,
  limiting the initial window's MSS to 4380 bytes allows the sender to
  transmit three segments initially in the common case when using 1500
  byte packets.

  Equivalently, the upper bound for the initial window size is based on
  the MSS, as follows:

      If (MSS <= 1095 bytes)
          then win <= 4 * MSS;
      If (1095 bytes < MSS < 2190 bytes)
          then win <= 4380;
      If (2190 bytes <= MSS)
          then win <= 2 * MSS;

  This increased initial window is optional: a TCP MAY start with a
  larger initial window.  However, we expect that most general-purpose
  TCP implementations would choose to use the larger initial congestion
  window given in equation (1) above.

  This upper bound for the initial window size represents a change from
  RFC 2581 [RFC2581], which specified that the congestion window be
  initialized to one or two segments.

  This change applies to the initial window of the connection in the
  first round trip time (RTT) of data transmission following the TCP
  three-way handshake.  Neither the SYN/ACK nor its acknowledgment
  (ACK) in the three-way handshake should increase the initial window
  size above that outlined in equation (1).  If the SYN or SYN/ACK is
  lost, the initial window used by a sender after a correctly
  transmitted SYN MUST be one segment consisting of MSS bytes.

  TCP implementations use slow start in as many as three different
  ways: (1) to start a new connection (the initial window); (2) to
  restart transmission after a long idle period (the restart window);
  and (3) to restart transmission after a retransmit timeout (the loss
  window).  The change specified in this document affects the value of
  the initial window.  Optionally, a TCP MAY set the restart window to
  the minimum of the value used for the initial window and the current
  value of cwnd (in other words, using a larger value for the restart
  window should never increase the size of cwnd).  These changes do NOT
  change the loss window, which must remain 1 segment of MSS bytes (to



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RFC 3390            Increasing TCP's Initial Window         October 2002


  permit the lowest possible window size in the case of severe
  congestion).

2.  Implementation Issues

  When larger initial windows are implemented along with Path MTU
  Discovery [RFC1191], and the MSS being used is found to be too large,
  the congestion window `cwnd' SHOULD be reduced to prevent large
  bursts of smaller segments.  Specifically, `cwnd' SHOULD be reduced
  by the ratio of the old segment size to the new segment size.

  When larger initial windows are implemented along with Path MTU
  Discovery [RFC1191], alternatives are to set the "Don't Fragment"
  (DF) bit in all segments in the initial window, or to set the "Don't
  Fragment" (DF) bit in one of the segments.  It is an open question as
  to which of these two alternatives is best; we would hope that
  implementation experiences will shed light on this question.  In the
  first case of setting the DF bit in all segments, if the initial
  packets are too large, then all of the initial packets will be
  dropped in the network.  In the second case of setting the DF bit in
  only one segment, if the initial packets are too large, then all but
  one of the initial packets will be fragmented in the network.  When
  the second case is followed, setting the DF bit in the last segment
  in the initial window provides the least chance for needless
  retransmissions when the initial segment size is found to be too
  large, because it minimizes the chances of duplicate ACKs triggering
  a Fast Retransmit.  However, more attention needs to be paid to the
  interaction between larger initial windows and Path MTU Discovery.

  The larger initial window specified in this document is not intended
  as encouragement for web browsers to open multiple simultaneous TCP
  connections, all with large initial windows.  When web browsers open
  simultaneous TCP connections to the same destination, they are
  working against TCP's congestion control mechanisms [FF99],
  regardless of the size of the initial window.  Combining this
  behavior with larger initial windows further increases the unfairness
  to other traffic in the network.  We suggest the use of HTTP/1.1
  [RFC2068] (persistent TCP connections and pipelining) as a way to
  achieve better performance of web transfers.

3.  Advantages of Larger Initial Windows

  1.  When the initial window is one segment, a receiver employing
      delayed ACKs [RFC1122] is forced to wait for a timeout before
      generating an ACK.  With an initial window of at least two
      segments, the receiver will generate an ACK after the second data
      segment arrives.  This eliminates the wait on the timeout (often
      up to 200 msec, and possibly up to 500 msec [RFC1122]).



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RFC 3390            Increasing TCP's Initial Window         October 2002


  2.  For connections transmitting only a small amount of data, a
      larger initial window reduces the transmission time (assuming at
      most moderate segment drop rates).  For many email (SMTP [Pos82])
      and web page (HTTP [RFC1945, RFC2068]) transfers that are less
      than 4K bytes, the larger initial window would reduce the data
      transfer time to a single RTT.

  3.  For connections that will be able to use large congestion
      windows, this modification eliminates up to three RTTs and a
      delayed ACK timeout during the initial slow-start phase.  This
      will be of particular benefit for high-bandwidth large-
      propagation-delay TCP connections, such as those over satellite
      links.

4.  Disadvantages of Larger Initial Windows for the Individual
   Connection

  In high-congestion environments, particularly for routers that have a
  bias against bursty traffic (as in the typical Drop Tail router
  queues), a TCP connection can sometimes be better off starting with
  an initial window of one segment.  There are scenarios where a TCP
  connection slow-starting from an initial window of one segment might
  not have segments dropped, while a TCP connection starting with an
  initial window of four segments might experience unnecessary
  retransmits due to the inability of the router to handle small
  bursts.  This could result in an unnecessary retransmit timeout.  For
  a large-window connection that is able to recover without a
  retransmit timeout, this could result in an unnecessarily-early
  transition from the slow-start to the congestion-avoidance phase of
  the window increase algorithm.  These premature segment drops are
  unlikely to occur in uncongested networks with sufficient buffering
  or in moderately-congested networks where the congested router uses
  active queue management (such as Random Early Detection [FJ93,
  RFC2309]).

  Some TCP connections will receive better performance with the larger
  initial window even if the burstiness of the initial window results
  in premature segment drops.  This will be true if (1) the TCP
  connection recovers from the segment drop without a retransmit
  timeout, and (2) the TCP connection is ultimately limited to a small
  congestion window by either network congestion or by the receiver's
  advertised window.

5.  Disadvantages of Larger Initial Windows for the Network

  In terms of the potential for congestion collapse, we consider two
  separate potential dangers for the network.  The first danger would
  be a scenario where a large number of segments on congested links



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RFC 3390            Increasing TCP's Initial Window         October 2002


  were duplicate segments that had already been received at the
  receiver.  The second danger would be a scenario where a large number
  of segments on congested links were segments that would be dropped
  later in the network before reaching their final destination.

  In terms of the negative effect on other traffic in the network, a
  potential disadvantage of larger initial windows would be that they
  increase the general packet drop rate in the network.  We discuss
  these three issues below.

  Duplicate segments:

      As described in the previous section, the larger initial window
      could occasionally result in a segment dropped from the initial
      window, when that segment might not have been dropped if the
      sender had slow-started from an initial window of one segment.
      However, Appendix A shows that even in this case, the larger
      initial window would not result in the transmission of a large
      number of duplicate segments.

  Segments dropped later in the network:

      How much would the larger initial window for TCP increase the
      number of segments on congested links that would be dropped
      before reaching their final destination?  This is a problem that
      can only occur for connections with multiple congested links,
      where some segments might use scarce bandwidth on the first
      congested link along the path, only to be dropped later along the
      path.

      First, many of the TCP connections will have only one congested
      link along the path.  Segments dropped from these connections do
      not "waste" scarce bandwidth, and do not contribute to congestion
      collapse.

      However, some network paths will have multiple congested links,
      and segments dropped from the initial window could use scarce
      bandwidth along the earlier congested links before ultimately
      being dropped on subsequent congested links.  To the extent that
      the drop rate is independent of the initial window used by TCP
      segments, the problem of congested links carrying segments that
      will be dropped before reaching their destination will be similar
      for TCP connections that start by sending four segments or one
      segment.







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RFC 3390            Increasing TCP's Initial Window         October 2002


  An increased packet drop rate:

      For a network with a high segment drop rate, increasing the TCP
      initial window could increase the segment drop rate even further.
      This is in part because routers with Drop Tail queue management
      have difficulties with bursty traffic in times of congestion.
      However, given uncorrelated arrivals for TCP connections, the
      larger TCP initial window should not significantly increase the
      segment drop rate.  Simulation-based explorations of these issues
      are discussed in Section 7.2.

  These potential dangers for the network are explored in simulations
  and experiments described in the section below.  Our judgment is that
  while there are dangers of congestion collapse in the current
  Internet (see [FF99] for a discussion of the dangers of congestion
  collapse from an increased deployment of UDP connections without
  end-to-end congestion control), there is no such danger to the
  network from increasing the TCP initial window to 4K bytes.

6.  Interactions with the Retransmission Timer

  Using a larger initial burst of data can exacerbate existing problems
  with spurious retransmit timeouts on low-bandwidth paths, assuming
  the standard algorithm for determining the TCP retransmission timeout
  (RTO) [RFC2988].  The problem is that across low-bandwidth network
  paths on which the transmission time of a packet is a large portion
  of the round-trip time, the small packets used to establish a TCP
  connection do not seed the RTO estimator appropriately.  When the
  first window of data packets is transmitted, the sender's retransmit
  timer could expire before the acknowledgments for those packets are
  received.  As each acknowledgment arrives, the retransmit timer is
  generally reset.  Thus, the retransmit timer will not expire as long
  as an acknowledgment arrives at least once a second, given the one-
  second minimum on the RTO recommended in RFC 2988.

  For instance, consider a 9.6 Kbps link.  The initial RTT measurement
  will be on the order of 67 msec, if we simply consider the
  transmission time of 2 packets (the SYN and SYN-ACK), each consisting
  of 40 bytes.  Using the RTO estimator given in [RFC2988], this yields
  an initial RTO of 201 msec (67 + 4*(67/2)).  However, we round the
  RTO to 1 second as specified in RFC 2988.  Then assume we send an
  initial window of one or more 1500-byte packets (1460 data bytes plus
  overhead).  Each packet will take on the order of 1.25 seconds to
  transmit.  Therefore, the RTO will fire before the ACK for the first
  packet returns, causing a spurious timeout.  In this case, a larger
  initial window of three or four packets exacerbates the problems
  caused by this spurious timeout.




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RFC 3390            Increasing TCP's Initial Window         October 2002


  One way to deal with this problem is to make the RTO algorithm more
  conservative.  During the initial window of data, for instance, the
  RTO could be updated for each acknowledgment received.  In addition,
  if the retransmit timer expires for some packet lost in the first
  window of data, we could leave the exponential-backoff of the
  retransmit timer engaged until at least one valid RTT measurement,
  that involves a data packet, is received.

  Another method would be to refrain from taking an RTT sample during
  connection establishment, leaving the default RTO in place until TCP
  takes a sample from a data segment and the corresponding ACK.  While
  this method likely helps prevent spurious retransmits, it also may
  slow the data transfer down if loss occurs before the RTO is seeded.
  The use of limited transmit [RFC3042] to aid a TCP connection in
  recovering from loss using fast retransmit rather than the RTO timer
  mitigates the performance degradation caused by using the high
  default RTO during the initial window of data transmission.

  This specification leaves the decision about what to do (if anything)
  with regards to the RTO, when using a larger initial window, to the
  implementer.  However, the RECOMMENDED approach is to refrain from
  sampling the RTT during the three-way handshake, keeping the default
  RTO in place until an RTT sample involving a data packet is taken.
  In addition, it is RECOMMENDED that TCPs use limited transmit
  [RFC3042].

7.  Typical Levels of Burstiness for TCP Traffic.

  Larger TCP initial windows would not dramatically increase the
  burstiness of TCP traffic in the Internet today, because such traffic
  is already fairly bursty.  Bursts of two and three segments are
  already typical of TCP [Flo97]; a delayed ACK (covering two
  previously unacknowledged segments) received during congestion
  avoidance causes the congestion window to slide and two segments to
  be sent.  The same delayed ACK received during slow start causes the
  window to slide by two segments and then be incremented by one
  segment, resulting in a three-segment burst.  While not necessarily
  typical, bursts of four and five segments for TCP are not rare.
  Assuming delayed ACKs, a single dropped ACK causes the subsequent ACK
  to cover four previously unacknowledged segments.  During congestion
  avoidance this leads to a four-segment burst, and during slow start a
  five-segment burst is generated.

  There are also changes in progress that reduce the performance
  problems posed by moderate traffic bursts.  One such change is the
  deployment of higher-speed links in some parts of the network, where
  a burst of 4K bytes can represent a small quantity of data.  A second
  change, for routers with sufficient buffering, is the deployment of



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RFC 3390            Increasing TCP's Initial Window         October 2002


  queue management mechanisms such as RED, which is designed to be
  tolerant of transient traffic bursts.

8.  Simulations and Experimental Results

8.1 Studies of TCP Connections using that Larger Initial Window

  This section surveys simulations and experiments that explore the
  effect of larger initial windows on TCP connections.  The first set
  of experiments explores performance over satellite links.  Larger
  initial windows have been shown to improve the performance of TCP
  connections over satellite channels [All97b].  In this study, an
  initial window of four segments (512 byte MSS) resulted in throughput
  improvements of up to 30% (depending upon transfer size).  [KAGT98]
  shows that the use of larger initial windows results in a decrease in
  transfer time in HTTP tests over the ACTS satellite system.  A study
  involving simulations of a large number of HTTP transactions over
  hybrid fiber coax (HFC) indicates that the use of larger initial
  windows decreases the time required to load WWW pages [Nic98].

  A second set of experiments explored TCP performance over dialup
  modem links.  In experiments over a 28.8 bps dialup channel [All97a,
  AHO98], a four-segment initial window decreased the transfer time of
  a 16KB file by roughly 10%, with no accompanying increase in the drop
  rate.  A simulation study [RFC2416] investigated the effects of using
  a larger initial window on a host connected by a slow modem link and
  a router with a 3 packet buffer.  The study concluded that for the
  scenario investigated, the use of larger initial windows was not
  harmful to TCP performance.

  Finally, [All00] illustrates that the percentage of connections at a
  particular web server that experience loss in the initial window of
  data transmission increases with the size of the initial congestion
  window.  However, the increase is in line with what would be expected
  from sending a larger burst into the network.

8.2 Studies of Networks using Larger Initial Windows

  This section surveys simulations and experiments investigating the
  impact of the larger window on other TCP connections sharing the
  path.  Experiments in [All97a, AHO98] show that for 16 KB transfers
  to 100 Internet hosts, four-segment initial windows resulted in a
  small increase in the drop rate of 0.04 segments/transfer.  While the
  drop rate increased slightly, the transfer time was reduced by
  roughly 25% for transfers using the four-segment (512 byte MSS)
  initial window when compared to an initial window of one segment.





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RFC 3390            Increasing TCP's Initial Window         October 2002


  A simulation study in [RFC2415] explores the impact of a larger
  initial window on competing network traffic.  In this investigation,
  HTTP and FTP flows share a single congested gateway (where the number
  of HTTP and FTP flows varies from one simulation set to another).
  For each simulation set, the paper examines aggregate link
  utilization and packet drop rates, median web page delay, and network
  power for the FTP transfers.  The larger initial window generally
  resulted in increased throughput, slightly-increased packet drop
  rates, and an increase in overall network power.  With the exception
  of one scenario, the larger initial window resulted in an increase in
  the drop rate of less than 1% above the loss rate experienced when
  using a one-segment initial window; in this scenario, the drop rate
  increased from 3.5% with one-segment initial windows, to 4.5% with
  four-segment initial windows.  The overall conclusions were that
  increasing the TCP initial window to three packets (or 4380 bytes)
  helps to improve perceived performance.

  Morris [Mor97] investigated larger initial windows in a highly
  congested network with transfers of 20K in size.  The loss rate in
  networks where all TCP connections use an initial window of four
  segments is shown to be 1-2% greater than in a network where all
  connections use an initial window of one segment.  This relationship
  held in scenarios where the loss rates with one-segment initial
  windows ranged from 1% to 11%.  In addition, in networks where
  connections used an initial window of four segments, TCP connections
  spent more time waiting for the retransmit timer (RTO) to expire to
  resend a segment than was spent using an initial window of one
  segment.  The time spent waiting for the RTO timer to expire
  represents idle time when no useful work was being accomplished for
  that connection.  These results show that in a very congested
  environment, where each connection's share of the bottleneck
  bandwidth is close to one segment, using a larger initial window can
  cause a perceptible increase in both loss rates and retransmit
  timeouts.

9.  Security Considerations

  This document discusses the initial congestion window permitted for
  TCP connections.  Changing this value does not raise any known new
  security issues with TCP.

10. Conclusion

  This document specifies a small change to TCP that will likely be
  beneficial to short-lived TCP connections and those over links with
  long RTTs (saving several RTTs during the initial slow-start phase).





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RFC 3390            Increasing TCP's Initial Window         October 2002


11. Acknowledgments

  We would like to acknowledge Vern Paxson, Tim Shepard, members of the
  End-to-End-Interest Mailing List, and members of the IETF TCP
  Implementation Working Group for continuing discussions of these
  issues and for feedback on this document.

12. References

  [AHO98]   Mark Allman, Chris Hayes, and Shawn Ostermann, An
            Evaluation of TCP with Larger Initial Windows, March 1998.
            ACM Computer Communication Review, 28(3), July 1998.  URL
            "http://roland.lerc.nasa.gov/~mallman/papers/initwin.ps".

  [All97a]  Mark Allman.  An Evaluation of TCP with Larger Initial
            Windows.  40th IETF Meeting -- TCP Implementations WG.
            December, 1997.  Washington, DC.

  [All97b]  Mark Allman.  Improving TCP Performance Over Satellite
            Channels.  Master's thesis, Ohio University, June 1997.

  [All00]   Mark Allman. A Web Server's View of the Transport Layer.
            ACM Computer Communication Review, 30(5), October 2000.

  [FF96]    Fall, K., and Floyd, S., Simulation-based Comparisons of
            Tahoe, Reno, and SACK TCP.  Computer Communication Review,
            26(3), July 1996.

  [FF99]    Sally Floyd, Kevin Fall.  Promoting the Use of End-to-End
            Congestion Control in the Internet.  IEEE/ACM Transactions
            on Networking, August 1999.  URL
            "http://www.icir.org/floyd/end2end-paper.html".

  [FJ93]    Floyd, S., and Jacobson, V., Random Early Detection
            gateways for Congestion Avoidance. IEEE/ACM Transactions on
            Networking, V.1 N.4, August 1993, p. 397-413.

  [Flo94]   Floyd, S., TCP and Explicit Congestion Notification.
            Computer Communication Review, 24(5):10-23, October 1994.

  [Flo96]   Floyd, S., Issues of TCP with SACK. Technical report,
            January 1996.  Available from http://www-
            nrg.ee.lbl.gov/floyd/.

  [Flo97]   Floyd, S., Increasing TCP's Initial Window.  Viewgraphs,
            40th IETF Meeting - TCP Implementations WG. December, 1997.
            URL "ftp://ftp.ee.lbl.gov/talks/sf-tcp-ietf97.ps".




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RFC 3390            Increasing TCP's Initial Window         October 2002


  [KAGT98]  Hans Kruse, Mark Allman, Jim Griner, Diepchi Tran.  HTTP
            Page Transfer Rates Over Geo-Stationary Satellite Links.
            March 1998.  Proceedings of the Sixth International
            Conference on Telecommunication Systems.  URL
            "http://roland.lerc.nasa.gov/~mallman/papers/nash98.ps".

  [Mor97]   Robert Morris.  Private communication, 1997.  Cited for
            acknowledgement purposes only.

  [Nic98]   Kathleen Nichols. Improving Network Simulation With
            Feedback, Proceedings of LCN 98, October 1998. URL
            "http://www.computer.org/proceedings/lcn/8810/8810toc.htm".

  [Pos82]   Postel, J., "Simple Mail Transfer Protocol", STD 10, RFC
            821, August 1982.

  [RFC1122] Braden, R., "Requirements for Internet Hosts --
            Communication Layers", STD 3, RFC 1122, October 1989.

  [RFC1191] Mogul, J. and S. Deering, "Path MTU Discovery", RFC 1191,
            November 1990.

  [RFC1945] Berners-Lee, T., Fielding, R. and H. Nielsen, "Hypertext
            Transfer Protocol -- HTTP/1.0", RFC 1945, May 1996.

  [RFC2068] Fielding, R., Mogul, J., Gettys, J., Frystyk, H. and T.
            Berners-Lee, "Hypertext Transfer Protocol -- HTTP/1.1", RFC
            2616, January 1997.

  [RFC2119] Bradner, S., "Key words for use in RFCs to Indicate
            Requirement Levels", BCP 14, RFC 2119, March 1997.

  [RFC2309] Braden, B., Clark, D., Crowcroft, J., Davie, B., Deering,
            S., Estrin, D., Floyd, S., Jacobson, V., Minshall, G.,
            Partridge, C., Peterson, L., Ramakrishnan, K., Shenker, S.,
            Wroclawski, J. and L.  Zhang, "Recommendations on Queue
            Management and Congestion Avoidance in the Internet", RFC
            2309, April 1998.

  [RFC2414] Allman, M., Floyd, S. and C. Partridge, "Increasing TCP's
            Initial Window", RFC 2414, September 1998.

  [RFC2415] Poduri, K. and K. Nichols, "Simulation Studies of Increased
            Initial TCP Window Size", RFC 2415, September 1998.

  [RFC2416] Shepard, T. and C. Partridge, "When TCP Starts Up With Four
            Packets Into Only Three Buffers", RFC 2416, September 1998.




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RFC 3390            Increasing TCP's Initial Window         October 2002


  [RFC2581] Allman, M., Paxson, V. and W. Stevens, "TCP Congestion
            Control", RFC 2581, April 1999.

  [RFC2821] Klensin, J., "Simple Mail Transfer Protocol", RFC 2821,
            April 2001.

  [RFC2988] Paxson, V. and M. Allman, "Computing TCP's Retransmission
            Timer", RFC 2988, November 2000.

  [RFC3042] Allman, M., Balakrishnan, H. and S. Floyd, "Enhancing TCP's
            Loss Recovery Using Limited Transmit", RFC 3042, January
            2001.

  [RFC3168] Ramakrishnan, K.K., Floyd, S. and D. Black, "The Addition
            of Explicit Congestion Notification (ECN) to IP", RFC 3168,
            September 2001.



































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RFC 3390            Increasing TCP's Initial Window         October 2002


Appendix A - Duplicate Segments

  In the current environment (without Explicit Congestion Notification
  [Flo94] [RFC2481]), all TCPs use segment drops as indications from
  the network about the limits of available bandwidth.  We argue here
  that the change to a larger initial window should not result in the
  sender retransmitting a large number of duplicate segments that have
  already arrived at the receiver.

  If one segment is dropped from the initial window, there are three
  different ways for TCP to recover: (1) Slow-starting from a window of
  one segment, as is done after a retransmit timeout, or after Fast
  Retransmit in Tahoe TCP; (2) Fast Recovery without selective
  acknowledgments (SACK), as is done after three duplicate ACKs in Reno
  TCP; and (3) Fast Recovery with SACK, for TCP where both the sender
  and the receiver support the SACK option [MMFR96].  In all three
  cases, if a single segment is dropped from the initial window, no
  duplicate segments (i.e., segments that have already been received at
  the receiver) are transmitted.  Note that for a TCP sending four
  512-byte segments in the initial window, a single segment drop will
  not require a retransmit timeout, but can be recovered by using the
  Fast Retransmit algorithm (unless the retransmit timer expires
  prematurely).  In addition, a single segment dropped from an initial
  window of three segments might be repaired using the fast retransmit
  algorithm, depending on which segment is dropped and whether or not
  delayed ACKs are used.  For example, dropping the first segment of a
  three segment initial window will always require waiting for a
  timeout, in the absence of Limited Transmit [RFC3042].  However,
  dropping the third segment will always allow recovery via the fast
  retransmit algorithm, as long as no ACKs are lost.

  Next we consider scenarios where the initial window contains two to
  four segments, and at least two of those segments are dropped.  If
  all segments in the initial window are dropped, then clearly no
  duplicate segments are retransmitted, as the receiver has not yet
  received any segments.  (It is still a possibility that these dropped
  segments used scarce bandwidth on the way to their drop point; this
  issue was discussed in Section 5.)

  When two segments are dropped from an initial window of three
  segments, the sender will only send a duplicate segment if the first
  two of the three segments were dropped, and the sender does not
  receive a packet with the SACK option acknowledging the third
  segment.

  When two segments are dropped from an initial window of four
  segments, an examination of the six possible scenarios (which we
  don't go through here) shows that, depending on the position of the



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RFC 3390            Increasing TCP's Initial Window         October 2002


  dropped packets, in the absence of SACK the sender might send one
  duplicate segment.  There are no scenarios in which the sender sends
  two duplicate segments.

  When three segments are dropped from an initial window of four
  segments, then, in the absence of SACK, it is possible that one
  duplicate segment will be sent, depending on the position of the
  dropped segments.

  The summary is that in the absence of SACK, there are some scenarios
  with multiple segment drops from the initial window where one
  duplicate segment will be transmitted.  There are no scenarios in
  which more than one duplicate segment will be transmitted.  Our
  conclusion is than the number of duplicate segments transmitted as a
  result of a larger initial window should be small.

Author's Addresses

  Mark Allman
  BBN Technologies/NASA Glenn Research Center
  21000 Brookpark Rd
  MS 54-5
  Cleveland, OH 44135
  EMail: [email protected]
  http://roland.lerc.nasa.gov/~mallman/

  Sally Floyd
  ICSI Center for Internet Research
  1947 Center St, Suite 600
  Berkeley, CA 94704
  Phone: +1 (510) 666-2989
  EMail: [email protected]
  http://www.icir.org/floyd/

  Craig Partridge
  BBN Technologies
  10 Moulton St
  Cambridge, MA 02138
  EMail: [email protected]












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RFC 3390            Increasing TCP's Initial Window         October 2002


Full Copyright Statement

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Acknowledgement

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