Adding Acknowledgement Congestion Control to TCP

This document describes a possible congestion control mechanism for acknowledgement (ACKs) traffic in TCP. The document specifies an end-to-end acknowledgement congestion control mechanism for TCP that uses participation from both TCP hosts: the TCP data sender and the TCP data receiver. The TCP data sender detects lost or Explicit Congestion Notification (ECN)-marked ACK packets, and tells the TCP data receiver the ACK Ratio R to use to respond to the congestion on the reverse path from the data receiver to the data sender. The TCP data receiver sends roughly one ACK packet for every R data packets received. This mechanism is based on the acknowledgement congestion control in the Datagram Congestion Control Protocol’s (DCCP’s) Congestion Control Identifier (CCID) 2. This acknowledgement congestion control mechanism is being specified for further evaluation by the network community.