TCP retransmission prioritisation for rapid recovery in slow and lossy networks

Existing TCP recovery schemes for lost packets are not optimised for wireless environments and consequently are subject to overall performance degradation and channel underutilisation. In slow lossy links the long recovery cycles associated with lost packets result in significant loss of TCP performance. Causes are related to slow packet drop detection. spurious timeouts, and erroneous congestion avoidance triggering that have a cumulatively adverse effect on throughput. In this paper we propose a novel and topical partial solution which focuses on the slow lossy link and not on the large scale Internet. Retransmitted packets are prioritised over originally transmitted ones, resulting in reduced recovery times. This proposed architecture involves only minor modifications to end nodes.