Technical Summary
This document describes an experimental proposal to allow TCP senders
to restart data transfer quickly following an idle or less active period.
This approach is expected to benefit applications that unable to send
at the maximum rate permitted by the congestion window for some reasons.
As a result, it aims to provide incentives for long-lived connections and
to remove ad-hoc tweaks in some applications that try to maintain a large
cwnd for future data transmissions.
The approach can be viewed as an updated version of RFC2861 and it obsoletes
RFC2861.
Working Group Summary
The draft has been discussed for around 4 years. There has been explicit support
for the draft since the beginning. Main discussion points were some detailed
mechanisms in the logic that are related to estimating path capacity and
preserving congestion window size during applications are idle or less active.
The initial intended status of the draft was PS, but it has been changed to
Experimental as a result of the discussions.
Linux kernel has the codes which address the same issue. Their algorithms
are slightly different from the document. There had been discussions between
the linux kernel implementers and the document authors; however, they haven't
reached the consensus to replace the existing kernel codes until more solid
evidences are found.
The WG's conclusion is to publish the draft as an experimental and explore
its efficiency and feasibility of this approach.
Document Quality
The document has been reviewed and discussed by multiple participants in the WG.
Some discussions points raised by reviewers are listed in Section 9.1.
The patches to FreeBSD and Linux kernel have been made by the efforts from the
authors and other group.
Personnel
Yoshifumi Nishida is the Document Shepherd for this document.
The Responsible Area Director is Martin Stiemerling