Limited Slow-Start for TCP with Large Congestion Windows

Metadata

Publisher: IETF
Doc Type: Experimental
Pages: 7
Abstract: This document describes an optional modification for TCP's slow-start for use with TCP connections with large congestion windows. For TCP connections that are able to use congestion windows of thousands (or tens of thousands) of MSS-sized segments (for MSS the sender's MAXIMUM SEGMENT SIZE), the current slow-start procedure can result in increasing the congestion window by thousands of segments in a single round-trip time. Such an increase can easily result in thousands of packets being dropped in one round-trip time. This is often counter-productive for the TCP flow itself, and is also hard on the rest of the traffic sharing the congested link. This note describes Limited Slow-Start as an optional mechanism for limiting the number of segments by which the congestion window is increased for one window of data during slow-start, in order to improve performance for TCP connections with large congestion windows. This memo defines an Experimental Protocol for the Internet community.
Publication Date: 2004-03-01
Status Note: Experimental
DOI: 10.17487/RFC3742
Link: https://doi.org/10.17487/RFC3742
Author(s): Sally Floyd
Keyword(s): TCP, Congestion Control

Latest version of IETF RFC 3742

Document Versions — IETF RFC 3742

▶ IETF RFC 3742 (2004-03-01)

THIS DOC [ACTIVE] [LATEST VERSION]

Normative Reference(s)

IETF RFC 2581 [Superseded*]
IETF RFC 3465 [Active*]

Bibliographic Reference(s)

Mohit Aron and Peter Druschel, "TCP: Improving Start-up Dynamics by Adaptive Timers and Congestion Control"", TR98-318, Rice University, 1998. URL " http://cs- tr.cs.rice.edu/Dienst/UI/2.0/Describe/ncstrl.rice_cs/TR98- 318/". EXTERNAL
The Network Simulator (NS). URL " http://www.isi.edu/nsnam/ns/ ". EXTERNAL
A. Gurtov, "TCP Performance in the Presence of Congestion and Corruption Losses", Master's Thesis, University of Helsinki, Department of Computer Science, Helsinki, December 2000. URL " http://www.cs.helsinki.fi/u/gurtov/papers/ms_thesis.html ". EXTERNAL
T. Dunigan, "Floyd's TCP slow-start and AIMD mods", 2002. URL " http://www.csm.ornl.gov/~dunigan/net100/floyd.html ". EXTERNAL
J. C. Hoe, "Improving the Start-up Behavior of a Congestion Control Scheme for TCP", SIGCOMM 96, 1996. URL " http://www.acm.org/sigcomm/sigcomm96/program.html ". EXTERNAL
Vegas Web Page, University of Arizona. URL " http://www.cs.arizona.edu/protocols/ ". EXTERNAL
S. Floyd, "Performance Problems with TCP's Slow-Start", 2002. URL " http://www.icir.org/floyd/hstcp/slowstart/ ". EXTERNAL
J. Kulik, R. Coulter, D. Rockwell, and C. Partridge, "A Simulation Study of Paced TCP", BBN Technical Memorandum No. 1218, 1999. URL " http://www.ir.bbn.com/documents/techmemos/index.html ". EXTERNAL
Vikram Visweswaraiah and John Heidemann, "Rate Based Pacing for TCP", 1997. URL " http://www.isi.edu/lsam/publications/rate_based_pacing/ ". EXTERNAL
A. Aggarwal, S. Savage, and T. Anderson, "Understanding the Performance of TCP Pacing", Proceedings of the 2000 IEEE Infocom Conference, Tel-Aviv, Israel, March, 2000. URL " http://www.cs.ucsd.edu/~savage/ ". EXTERNAL
G. Wright and W. Stevens, "TCP/IP Illustrated", Volume 2, Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, 1995. EXTERNAL
M. Mathis and J. Mahdavi, "Forward Acknowledgment: Refining TCP Congestion Control", SIGCOMM, August 1996. EXTERNAL

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IETF RFC 3742, Limited Slow-Start for TCP with Large Congestion Windows
doi: 10.17487/RFC3742
url: https://doi.org/10.17487/RFC3742

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Referenced By

IETF RFC 4614 [Superseded*]
IETF RFC 4782 [Active*]
IETF RFC 4898 [Active*]
IETF RFC 5783 [Active*]
IETF RFC 6077 [Active*]
IETF RFC 7414 [Active*]
IETF RFC 8312 [Superseded*]
IETF RFC 9438 [Active*]