The IESG has approved the following document: - 'Limited Slow-Start for TCP with Large Congestion Windows ' <draft-ietf-tsvwg-slowstart-00.txt> as an Experimental RFC This document is the product of the Transport Area Working Group Working Group. The IESG contact persons are Jon Peterson and Allison Mankin. Technical Summary This note describes an optional modification for TCP's slow-start for use with TCP connections with large congestion windows. For TCP connections tha are able to use congestion windows of thousands (or tens of thousands) of MSS-sized segments (for MSS the sender's MAXIMUM SEGMENT SIZE), the current slow-start procedure can result in increasing the congestion window by thousands of segments in a single round-trip time. Such an increase can easily result in thousands of packets being dropped in one round-trip time. This is often counter-productive for the TCP flow itself, and is also hard o the rest of the traffic sharing the congested link. This note describes Limited Slow-Start as an optional mechanism for limiting the number of segments by which the congestion window is increased for one window of data during slow-start, in order to improve performance for TCP connections with large congestion windows. This document also compares the proposed approach with alternative solutions Working Group Summary Many solutions have been considered for addressing the known issues with TCP performance in a context of high congestion window sizes; this document form a part of a larger HighSpeed TCP proposal. The community TSVWG welcomed the opportunity to further explore this Experimental mechanism, and supported th advancement of this document. Protocol Quality This document was reviewed for the IESG by Jon Peterson.
