A method for improving TCP's retransmission timeout mechanism
Haifeng You, Jingsha He · China-Ireland International Conference on Information and Communications Technologies (CIICT 2007) · 2007
We present a new algorithm that can improve TCP throughput through dynamically changing the retransmission timeout (RTO) parameter in this paper. Research shows that 83-95% of IP flows is controlled by TCP traffic [1] and 13% of TCP packets are retransmitted [2] although half of the retransmitted packets are unnecessary. The reason is that almost all the algorithms adopted by today's TCP algorithms work well for the environment under which network load is relatively small. When network load increases, approaching congestion, traditional TCP algorithms start to have some negative effect on network throughput. Even worst, they will incur unnecessary retransmission to make the congestion aggregate. After performing some experiment on retransmission timeout in traditional TCP algorithms and point out the problems under some specific conditions, we propose a new algorithm in which the RTO value would be adjusted based on network load to improve network performance.