Computing TCP's Retransmission Timer

Internet-Drafts are working documents of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), its areas, and its working groups. Note that other groups may also distribute working documents as Internet-Drafts. Internet-Drafts are draft documents valid for a maximum of six months and may be updated, replaced, or obsoleted by other documents at any time. It is inappropriate to use Internet-Drafts as reference material or to cite them other than as "work in progress." Abstract 1 Introduction The Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) [Pos81] uses a retransmission timer to ensure data delivery in the absence of any feedback from the remote data receiver. The duration of this timer is referred to as RTO (retransmission timeout). RFC 1122 [Bra89] specifies that the RTO should be calculated as outlined in [Jac88]. This document codifies the algorithm for setting the RTO. RFC 2581 [APS99] outlines the algorithm TCP uses to begin sending after the RTO expires and a retransmission is sent. This document does not alter the behavior outlined in RFC 2581 [APS99]. 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 [Bra97]. 2 The Basic Algorithm To compute the current RTO, a TCP sender maintains two state variables, SRTT (smoothed round-trip time) and RTTVAR (round-trip time variation). The rules governing the computation of SRTT, RTTVAR, and RTO are as follows: (2.1) Until a round-trip time (RTT) measurement has been made for a