Block acknowledgement: redesigning the window protocol
Gavin M. Brown, Mohamed G. Gouda, Raymond E. Miller · 1989
We describe a new version of the window protocol where message sequence numbers are taken from a finite domain and where both message disorder and loss can be tolerated. Most existing window protocols achieve only one of these two goals. Our protocol is based on a new method of acknowledgement, called block acknowledgement, where each acknowledgement message has two numbers m and n to acknowledge the reception of all data messages with sequence numbers ranging from m to n. Using this method of acknowledgement, the proposed protocol achieves the two goals while maintaining the same data transmission capability of the traditional window protocol.