On ACK filtering on a slow reverse channel

Acknowledgement (ACK) filtering has been proposed as a technique to alleviate the congestion at the input of a slow channel located on the reverse path of a TCP connection. Old ACKs waiting at the input of the slow channel are erased when new ACKs are to be queued. In the literature the case of one‐ACK per connection at a time has been studied. In this paper we show that this is too aggressive for short transfers where ACKs arrive in bursts due to the slow start phase, and where the TCP source needs to receive the maximum number of ACKs to increase fast its window. We study first static filtering where a certain ACK queue length is allowed. We show analytically how this length needs to be chosen. We present then some algorithms that adapt the filtering of ACKs as a function of the slow channel utilization rather than the ACK queue length. These algorithms provide a good compromise between reducing the ACK queueing delay and passing a large number of ACKs that guarantee a fast window increase. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.