RFC 3742 (rfc3742) - Page 1 of 7
Limited Slow-Start for TCP with Large Congestion Windows
Alternative Format: Original Text Document
Network Working Group S. Floyd
Request for Comments: 3742 ICSI
Category: Experimental March 2004
Limited Slow-Start for TCP with Large Congestion Windows
Status of this Memo
This memo defines an Experimental Protocol for the Internet
community. It does not specify an Internet standard of any kind.
Discussion and suggestions for improvement are requested.
Distribution of this memo is unlimited.
Copyright Notice
Copyright (C) The Internet Society (2004). All Rights Reserved.
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.
1. Introduction
This note 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, limiting the number of segments by which the
Floyd Experimental