TCP Congestion Window Validation
Mark James Handley, Jitendra Padhye, Sally Floyd · 2000
TCP's congestion window controls the number of packets a TCP flow may have in the network at any time. However, long periods when the sender is idle or application-limited can lead to the invalidation of the congestion window, in that the congestion window no longer reflects current information about the state of the network. This document describes a simple modification to TCP's congestion control algorithms to decay the congestion window cwnd after the transition from a sufficiently-long application-limited period, while using the slow-start threshold ssthresh to save information about the previous value of the congestion window. Handley et al. [Page 1] draft-handley-TCP TCP Congestion Window Validation December 1999 An invalid congestion window also results when the congestion window is increased (i.e., in TCP's slow-start or congestion avoidance phases) during application-limited periods, when the previous value of the congestion window might never have been fully utilized. We ...