TCP Congestion Control with Appropriate Byte Counting (ABC)

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. Abstract This document proposes a small modification to the way TCP increases its congestion window. Rather than the traditional method of increasing the congestion window by a constant amount for each arriving acknowledgment, the document suggests basing the increase on the number of previously unacknowledged bytes each ACK covers. This change improves the performance of TCP, as well as closes a security hole TCP receivers can use to induce the sender into increasing the sending rate too rapidly. Terminology Much of the language in this document is taken from [RFC2581]. The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT", "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and "OPTIONAL" in this document are to be interpreted as described in [RFC2119]. 1 Introduction This document proposes a modification to the algorithm for increasing TCP's congestion window (cwnd) that improves both performance and security. Rather than increasing a TCP's congestion window based on the number of acknowledgments (ACKs) that arrive at the data sender (per the current specification [RFC2581]), the congestion window is increased based on the number of bytes acknowledged by the arriving ACKs. The algorithm improves performance by mitigating the impact of delayed ACKs on the growth of cwnd. At the same time, the algorithm provides cwnd growth in direct relation to the probed capacity of a Allman Experimental [Page 1]