Analysis and improvement of TCP RTO mechanism in heterogeneous networks

TCP is the prevalent, reliable transport control protocol. It is designed for wired network. However, when it is used in heterogeneous networks, TCP performance will degrade, especially for timing mechanism. This paper analyzes typical timing estimating arithmetic, and then proposes a modified TCP timing mechanism and its performance are investigated through simulations. Comparing with tradition timing mechanism, spurious timeout will be avoided; the probability of retransmission will be decreased. In addition, the improved timing mechanism is obtained through a little modification at the sender side, so it can be easily developed.