Increasing TCP's Initial Window

Mark C. Allman, Sally Floyd, Craig Partridge · 2002

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. 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.

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