Internet Engineering Task Force

This document proposes a new TCP mechanism that can be used to more effectively recover lost segments when a connection’s congestion window is small, or when a large number of segments are lost in a single transmission window. The ‘‘Limited Transmit’’ algorithm calls for sending a new data segment in response to each of the first two duplicate acknowledgments that arrive at the sender. Transmitting these segments increases the probability that TCP can recover from a single lost segment using the fast retransmit algorithm, rather than using a costly retransmission timeout. Limited Transmit can be used both in conjunction with, and in the absence of, the TCP selective acknowledgment (SACK) mechanism [RFC2018].