Retransmission loss recovery by duplicate acknowledgment counting

Abstract

The performance of transmission control protocol (TCP) is largely dependent upon its loss recovery. Therefore, it is a very important issue whether the packet losses may be recovered without retransmission timeout (RTO) or not. TCP always evokes RTO if a retransmitted packet is lost again. In order to alleviate this problem, we propose an algorithm called duplicate acknowledgment counting (DAC). We use a stochastic model to evaluate the performance of DAC, and compare it with TCP NewReno. Numerical results evaluated by simulations show that DAC can improve TCP loss recovery significantly in presence of random losses.