The Eifel algorithm: Making TCP robust against spurious retransmissions

We propose an enhancement to TCP's error recovery scheme, which we call the Eifel algorithm. It eliminates the retransmission ambiguity, thereby solvi ng the problems caused by spurious timeouts and spurious fast retransmits. It can be incrementally deployed as it is backwards compatible and does not change TCP's congestion control semantics. In environments where spurious retransmissions occur frequently, the algorithm can improve the end-to-end throughput by several tens of percent. An exact quantification is, however, highly dependent on the path characteristics over time. The Eifel algorith m finally makes TCP truly wireless-capable without the need for proxies bet ween the end points. Another key novelty is that the Eifel algorithm provid es for the implementation of a more optimistic retransmission timer because it reduces the penalty of a spurious timeout to a single tin the common ca se) spurious retransmission.