TCP byte counting refinements

Abstract

TCP's delayed acknowledgment algorithm has been shown to hurt TCP performance. One method of gaining the performance lost by reducing the number of acknowledgments sent is to use a limited byte counting algorithm. However, we show that as outlined in [All98], limited byte counting is too aggressive in some situations. This paper defines an appropriate byte counting algorithm to fix this aggressiveness. This paper shows that appropriate byte counting is a better overall algorithm. In addition, a scaled version of the appropriate byte counting algorithm, which provides finer-grained control over the aggressiveness of the algorithm, is outlined. In addition, unlike previous work this paper considers the impact of byte counting flows on competing traffic and shows that it is not fundamentally unfair to competing flows that do not use the new algorithm.