A proposal for a solution of the TCP short-term deadlock problem

Since the TCP is the most important transport protocol in the Internet, it should be strongly encouraged to improve its performance and usability. In this paper, we discuss one of major drawbacks called “TCP short-term deadlock problem” in the current TCP implementations. Because of inadequate delayed acknowledgment handling, the short-term deadlocks where data are transferred intermittently occur repeatedly under some conditions. As its result, the end-to-end throughput on the TCP connection is extremely decreased. Some solutions have been proposed for this problem, however, they turn off its delayed acknowledgment mechanism in order to eliminate the short-term deadlocks, therefore, they add more meaningless traffic. We propose yet another solution for this problem. Our solution can eliminate the deadlocks and add little traffic more. In this paper, we first discuss the nature of the short-term deadlock. We then discuss our solutions and show its performance evaluation