# TCP and congestion control¶

Warning

This is an unpolished draft of the second edition of this ebook. If you find any error or have suggestions to improve the text, please create an issue via https://github.com/obonaventure/cnp3/issues?milestone=2

A complete TCP implementation includes several mechanisms that interact together : reliable transfert that uses acknowledgements, timers, retransmissions, flow control that relies on sliding windows and congestion control. To understand the interactions between these different mechanisms, we analyse how TCP reacts in various situations where some of these mechanisms are disabled. Then we progressively add new mechanisms to end the exercises with a fairly complete TCP implementation.

Unless otherwise noted, we assume for the exercices in this section that the following conditions hold.

• the sender/receiver performs a single send(3) of x bytes
• the round-trip-time is fixed and does not change during the lifetime of the TCP connection. We assume a fixed value of 100 milliseconds for the rtt and a fixed value of 200 milliseconds for the retransmission timer.
• the delay required to transmit a single TCP segment containing MSS bytes is small and set to 1 milliseconds, independently of the MSS size
• the transmission delay for a TCP ack is negligible
• the initial value of the congestion window is one MSS-sized segment
• the value of the duplicate ack threshold is fixed and set to 3
• TCP always acks each received segment

## Open questions¶

1. To understand the operation of the TCP congestion control, it is often useful to write time-sequence diagrams for different scenarios. The example below shows the operation of the TCP congestion control scheme in a very simple scenario. The initial congestion window (cwnd) is set to 1000 bytes and the receive window (rwin) advertised by the receiver (supposed constant for the entire connection) is set to 2000 bytes. The slow-start threshold (ssthresh) is set to 64000 bytes.
1. Can you explain why the sender only sends one segment first and then two successive segments (the delay between the two segments on the figure is due to graphical reasons) ?
2. Can you explain why the congestion window is increased after the reception of the first ack ?
3. How long does it take for the sender to deliver 3 KBytes to the receiver ?
1. Same question as above but now with a small variation. Recent TCP implementations use a large initial value for the congestion window. Draw the time-sequence diagram that corresponds to an initial value of 10000 bytes for this congestion window.
1. Same question as the first one, but consider that the MSS on the sender is set to 500 bytes. How does this modification affect the entire delay ?
1. Assuming that there are no losses and that there is no congestion in the network. If the sender writes x bytes on a newly established TCP connection, derive a formula that computes the minimum time required to deliver all these x bytes to the receiver. For the derivation of this formula, assume that x is a multiple of the maximum segment size and that the receive window and the slow-start threshold are larger than x.
2. In question 1, we assumed that the receiver acknowledged every segment received from the sender. In practice, many deployed TCP implementations use delayed acknowledgements. Assuming a delayed acknowledgement timer of 50 milliseconds, modify the time-sequence diagram below to reflect the impact of these delayed acknowledgement. Does their usage decreases or increased the transmission delay ?
1. Let us now explore the impact of congestion on the slow-start and congestion avoidance mechanisms. Consider the scenario below. For graphical reasons, it is not possible anymore to show information about the segments on the graph, but you can easily infer them.
1. Redraw the same figure assuming that the second segment that was delivered by the sender in the figure experienced congestion. In a network that uses Explicit Congestion Notification, this segment would be marked by routers and the receiver would return the congestion mark in the corresponding acknowledgement.
2. Same question, but assume now that the fourth segment delivered by the sender experienced congestion (but was not discarded).
1. A TCP connection has been active for some time and has reached a congestion window of 4000 bytes. Four segments are sent, but the second (shown in red in the figure) is corrupted. Complete the time-sequence diagram.