Publication No 36640

Author(s)

Scharf, M.*; Floyd, S.; Sarolahti, P.

Title

TCP Flow Control for Fast Startup Schemes: draft-scharf-tcpm-flow-control-quick-start-00.txt

Topics

Internet; Communication Control

Methods

Traffic Engineering; Protocol Engineering

Keywords

TCP; CONGESTION CONTROL; INTERNET

Abstract

This document describes extensions for the flow control of the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) that avoid interactions with fast startup congestion control mechanisms, in particular the Quick-Start TCP extension. Quick-Start is an optional TCP extension that allows to start data transfers with a large congestion window, using feedback of the routers along the path. This can avoid the time consuming Slow-Start, provided that the TCP flow control is not a limiting factor. There are two potential interactions between the TCP flow control and congestion control schemes without the standard Slow-Start: First, receivers might not allocate a sufficiently large buffer space after connection setup, or they may advertise a receive window implicitly assuming the Slow-Start behavior on the sender side. This document therefore provides guidelines for buffer allocation in hosts supporting the Quick-Start extension. Second, the TCP receive window scaling mechanism can prevent fast startups immediately after the initial three-way handshake connection setup. This document describes a simple solution to overcome this problem.

Year

2008

Reference entry

Scharf, M.; Floyd, S.; Sarolahti, P.
TCP Flow Control for Fast Startup Schemes: draft-scharf-tcpm-flow-control-quick-start-00.txt
Report, Submitted as Internet-Draft to the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), July 2008

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