STODER: a robust and efficient algorithm for handling spurious retransmit timeouts in TCP

TCP frequently experiences spurious timeouts in wireless wide-area networks (WWAN), because of the large delay variance in wireless links. Due to the retransmission ambiguity, the conventional TCP sender fails to identify spurious timeouts and therefore unnecessarily decreases the throughput. Several schemes have been proposed to detect the spurious timeouts, but they have downsides like: 1) undesirable overhead; 2) fail to detect in certain situations; and 3) may bring new security concerns. In this paper, we present a novel spurious timeout detection algorithm, named STODER. STODER exploits TCP repacketization to detect spurious timeouts without any additional overhead in data packets. Since STODER relies only on the basic TCP reliable semantics, unlike existing works, it does not bring new attacks from misbehaving receivers. Our simulations show it yields improved performance comparing to existing schemes in general situations