6: Abstract Sliding Windows
- Page ID
- 11015
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In addition to reliability, we also want to keep as many packets in transit as the network can support. The strategy used to achieve this is known as sliding windows. It turns out that the sliding-windows algorithm is also the key to managing congestion; we return to this in 13 TCP Reno and Congestion Management.
The End-to-End principle, 12.1 The End-to-End Principle, suggests that trying to achieve a reliable transport layer by building reliability into a lower layer is a misguided approach; that is, implementing reliability at the endpoints of a connection – as is described here – is in fact the correct mechanism.
- 6.1: Building Reliable Transport - Stop-and-Wait
- Retransmit-on-timeout generally requires sequence numbering for the packets, though if a network path is guaranteed not to reorder packets then it is safe to allow the sequence numbers to wrap around surprisingly quickly (for stop-and-wait, a single-bit sequence number will work; see exercise 8.5). However, as the no-reordering hypothesis does not apply to the Internet at large, we will assume conventional numbering. Data[N] will be the Nth data packet, acknowledged by ACK[N].