TRADITIONAL TCP

Dr. A. Beulah
AP/CSE

1 August 2023 Unit III Beulah A. 1

Architecture of TCP/IP

• TCP
– Telnet, SMTP, FTP
– HTTP
• UDP
– DNS
– SNMP

1 August 2023 Unit III Beulah A. 2

Terminologies of TCP/IP

• TCP  ARP
• IP  RARP
• HTTP  BOOTP
• SMTP  Routers
• MIME  DNS
• FTP  IP Address
• SNMP  ICMP
 IGMP

1 August 2023 Unit III Beulah A. 3

Overview of TCP Operations
• TCP Segment
• Port address
• Data Encapsulation

1 August 2023 Unit III Beulah A. 4

TCP Segment
• 20 or 60 byte header

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Numbering System
• Byte Number
• Sequence Number
• Acknowledgment Number

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Byte Number
• Each byte should be numbered
• Random number – 1057
• Data contains 6000 bytes
• 1057 – 7056

1 August 2023 Unit III Beulah A. 7

Sequence Number
• Sequence number for each segment is the number of the first byte carried in
that segment
• Imagine a TCP connection is transferring a file of 6000 bytes. The first byte
is numbered 10010. What are the sequence numbers for each segment if
data are sent in five segments with the first four segments carrying 1000
bytes and the last segment carrying 2000 bytes?

1 August 2023 Unit III Beulah A. 8

Sequence Number
• The following shows the sequence number for each segment:
Segment 1 ==> sequence number: 10,010
(range: 10,010 to 11,009)
Segment 2 ==> sequence number: 11,010
(range: 11,010 to 12,009)
Segment 3 ==> sequence number: 12,010
(range: 12,010 to 13,009)
Segment 4 ==> sequence number: 13,010
(range: 13,010 to 14,009)
Segment 5 ==> sequence number: 14,010
(range: 14,010 to 16,009)

1 August 2023 Unit III Beulah A. 9

Acknowledgment Number
• The value of the acknowledgment field in a segment defines the number of
the next byte a party expects to receive.
• The acknowledgment number is cumulative.

1 August 2023 Unit III Beulah A. 10

Port Nos.

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Data Encapsulation

1 August 2023 Unit III Beulah A. 12

Application Layer Protocols of TCP
• SMTP
• FTP
• Telnet

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 ADAPTATION OF TCP WINDOW

1 August 2023 Unit III Beulah A. 14

Basic Concepts
• E.g. HTTP (used by web services) typically uses
TCP Client Server
TCP SYN
– Reliable transport between client and server
required TCP SYN/ACK Connection
• TCP setup
TCP ACK
– Stream oriented, not transaction oriented
HTTP request
– Packet Loss
➔ congestion Data
HTTP response transmission
➔ slow down transmission
• Well known – TCP guesses quite often wrong in >15 s
wireless and mobile networks no data
– Packet loss due to transmission errors Connection
release
– Packet loss due to change of network
• Result
– Severe performance degradation

1 August 2023 Unit III Beulah A. 15

Additive Increase

• Additive Increase is a reaction to perceivedSource Destination

available capacity.
• Linear Increase → For each “cwnd’s
worth” of packets sent, increase cwnd by
1 packet.
• In practice, cwnd is incremented
exponentially for each arriving ACK.

1 August 2023 Unit III Beulah A. 16

Silly Window Syndrome
• If a receiver with this problem is unable to process all incoming data, it
requests that its sender reduce the amount of data they send at a time.
• MSS/2
• If the receiver continues to be unable to process all incoming data, the
window becomes smaller and smaller, sometimes to the point that the data
transmitted is smaller than the packet header, making data transmission
extremely inefficient.
• The name of this problem is due to the window size shrinking to a "silly"
value.
• Nagel’s Algorithm

1 August 2023 Unit III Beulah A. 17

Silly Window Syndrome
Nagel’s Algorithm

if there is new data to send then

if the window size ≥ MSS and available data is ≥ MSS then
send complete MSS segment now
else
if there is unconfirmed data still in the pipe then
enqueue data in the buffer until an acknowledge is received
else
send data immediately
end if
end if
end if

1 August 2023 Unit III Beulah A. 18

Adaptive Retransmission
• TCP achieves reliability by retransmitting segments after a Timeout

• Choosing the value of the Timeout

– Set time out as a function as RTT
– If too small, retransmit unnecessarily
– If too large, poor throughput
– Make this adaptive, to respond to changing congestion delays in Internet

1 August 2023 Unit III Beulah A. 19

Adaptive Retransmission

Associating the ACK with (a) original transmission versus (b) retransmission

Unit III Beulah A. 1 August 2023 20

 IMPROVEMENT IN TCP
PERFORMANCE

1 August 2023 Unit III Beulah A. 21

Improvement in TCP Performance
• Traditional TCP
– Slow Start
– Fast Retransmit and recovery
• Popular TCP Congestion Control Algorithms
– TCP Tahoe
– TCP Reno
– TCP SACK
– TCP Vegas
• TCP in Mobile Networks

1 August 2023 Unit III Beulah A. 22

TCP Slow-Start algorithm
• Sender calculates a congestion window for Host A Host B
a receiver
• Start with a congestion window size equal

RTT
to one segment
• Exponential increase of the congestion
window up to the congestion threshold,
then linear increase
• Missing acknowledgement causes the
reduction of the congestion threshold to
one half of the current congestion
window
• Congestion window starts again with one time
segment

1 August 2023 Unit III Beulah A. 23

Fast Retransmit
Sender Receiver
Packet 1
• Coarse timeouts remained a Packet 2
problem, and Fast retransmit was Packet 3 ACK 1

added with TCP. Packet 4 ACK 2

• Since the receiver responds every Packet 5 ACK 2

time a packet arrives, this implies the Packet 6
sender will see duplicate ACKs. ACK 2

• Use duplicate ACKs to signal lost ACK 2

packet. Retransmit
• Upon receipt of three duplicate ACKs, packet 3

the TCP Sender retransmits the lost ACK 6

packet.

1 August 2023 Unit III Beulah A. 24

Fast Recovery
• Fast recovery was added with TCP.
• When fast retransmit detects three duplicate ACKs, start the recovery
process from congestion
• After Fast Retransmit, half the cwnd and commence recovery from this point
using linear additive increase.
Old cwnd

Packet lost

New cwnd = (old cwnd)/2

Usable window increased by 1
for each duplicate ACK
Left edge fixed till ACK
received
1 August 2023 Unit III Beulah A. 25
Popular TCP Congestion Control Algs

• Comparison
– Tahoe: Slow start, fast retransmit
– Reno: Tahoe + fast recovery
– New-Reno: Reno with modified fast recovery
– SACK: Reno + selective ACKs
– Vegas: Modified Slow start, and retransmission

1 August 2023 Unit III Beulah A. 26

TCP Tahoe

Packet loss is identified in 2 ways:

1. Time out
2. Dup acks

• Slow start, fast retransmit

• Fast retransmit improves channel utilization
• Two slow start situations:
▪ At the very beginning of a connection {cold start}.
▪ When the connection goes dead waiting for a timeout to occur (i.e, the
advertized window goes to zero!)

1 August 2023 Unit III Beulah A. 27

TCP Tahoe
• Coarse timeouts remained a problem, and Fast retransmit was added with
TCP Tahoe.
• Since the receiver responds every time a packet arrives, this implies the
sender will see duplicate ACKs.
Basic Idea:: use duplicate ACKs to signal lost packet.

Fast Retransmit
Upon receipt of three duplicate ACKs, the TCP Sender
retransmits the lost packet.

1 August 2023 Unit III Beulah A. 28

TCP Tahoe
• Limitations
– Too aggressive
– Returns to slow start on every congestion

Slow start Slow start

1 August 2023 Unit III Beulah A. 29

TCP Reno
• Tahoe + fast recovery
• After fast retransmit, reduce cwnd by half, and continue sending segments
at this reduced level. (Instead of moving to slow start)
• Limitations
– Has to wait for 3 Dup-ACKs
– Inefficient incase of multiple losses

1 August 2023 Unit III Beulah A. 30

TCP New-Reno
• Reno with modified fast recovery
• New-Reno continues with fast recovery if a partial ACK is received
• When duplicate ACKs trigger a retransmission for a lost packet, remember
the highest packet sent from window in recover.
• In sender side, upon receiving an ACK,
– if ACK < recover => partial ACK (for old segment sent)
– If ACK ≥ recover => new ACK (for previous segment sent)
• Partial ACK implies another lost packet: retransmit next packet, inflate
window and stay in fast recovery.
• New ACK implies fast recovery is over: starting from 0.5 x cwnd proceed
with congestion avoidance (linear increase).
• New Reno recovers from n losses in n round trips.
1 August 2023 Unit III Beulah A. 31
TCP New-Reno

Old cwnd

Packet 1 lost Packet 2 lost LP: Last Packet sent before loss
detection (recover)

New cwnd = (old cwnd)/2

Usable window increased by 1
for each duplicate ACK until
ACK for recover is received

1 August 2023 Unit III Beulah A. 32

TCP SACK
• Reno + selective ACKs

receiver’s buffer

1-100 101-200
sender

receiver
1-100 101-200 401-500 501-600

1 August 2023 Unit III Beulah A. 33

TCP SACK

TCP without SACK TCP with SACK

receiver
receiver

sender
sender

fast retransmit fast retransmit

1 August 2023 Unit III Beulah A. 34

TCP Vegas
• The only way Tahoe, Reno and New Reno can detect congestion is by
creating congestion!
– They carefully probe for congestion by slowly increasing their sending rate.
– When they find (create), congestion, they cut sending rate at least in half!

1 August 2023 Unit III Beulah A. 35

TCP Vegas
• There are three ways proposed in Vegas to increase delivery throughput and decrease
packet loss.
– Modified Slow-Start Mechanism
• Cwnd is allowed exponential growth only every other RTT. (doubles the size of
cwnd every 2 RTT time while there are no losses).
– New Congestion Avoidance Mechanism
• Control the size of cwnd by observing the variation of RTT
• Congestion in network (high RTT)
– New Retransmission Mechanism
• Sender does retransmission after a dupACK received, if RTT estimate > timeout (without
waiting for 3 dupACKs)

1 August 2023 Unit III Beulah A. 36

Summary
• Transmission Control Protocol(TCP)
– Basic concepts of TCP
– TCP header
• Adaptation of TCP window
– Silly window syndrome
– Adaptive retransmision
• Improvements in TCP (Wired TCP)
– TCP Tahoe
– TCP Reno
– TCP New-Reno
– TCP SACK
– TCP Vegas

1 August 2023 Unit III Beulah A. 37

Test your understanding
• Why do congestion occur in a network?

• How does slow start help improve the performance of TCP?

1 August 2023 Unit III Beulah A. 38

References
• Prasant Kumar Pattnaik, Rajib Mall, “Fundamentals of Mobile Computing”,
PHI Learning Pvt. Ltd, New Delhi – 2012.
• Jochen H. Schller, “Mobile Communications”, Second Edition, Pearson
Education, New Delhi, 2007.
• Behrouz A. Forouzan, “Data communication and Networking”, Fourth
Edition,Tata McGraw – Hill, 2011.

1 August 2023 Unit III Beulah A. 39