Using End-to-End Statistics to Distinguish Congestion and Corruption Losses : A Negative Result
Saâd Biaz, Nitin H. Vaidya · 1997
On wireless links, the rate of corruption losses can be significant, leading to poor TCP performance. The performance gets worse when these losses are mistaken for congestion losses, unduly triggering the TCP congestion control algorithms. To avoid this, techniques to distinguish between corruption and congestion losses without any explicit information from the network (routers or switches) are of interest. In the past, several proposals require TCP sender to reduce its window size when congestion is detected. These schemes use heuristics to detect congestion by using some simple statistics on round-trip delays and/or throughput. If the heuristics developed in the past are good (i.e., accurate much of the time), then one possible mechanism for distinguishing between errors and congestion are as follows: (a) Use a good heuristic that asks TCP sender to reduce window size when congestion is Research reported is supported in part by Texas Advanced Technology Program grant 009741-052-C,...