EXPERIENTIAL LEARNING OF NETWORKING TECHNOLOGIES: Understanding TCP Flow Control and Congestion Control
Ram Prakash Rustagi, Viraj Kumar · 2019
In a TCP connection, the underlying network drops packets when it lacks the capacity to deliver all the packets sent by the sender to the receiver. This phenomenon is called congestion. TCP at the sender’s side will not receive acks for these dropped packets. Since TCP is a reliable protocol, the sender must retransmit all these packets. The mechanism used by TCP to deal with such situations is called TCP Congestion Control. In this article, we explain the basics of congestion control and provide experiential exercises to help understand its impact on TCP performance.