TCP fast retransmit and recovery
TCP Slow Start and Congestion Avoidance lower the data throughput drastically when segment loss is detected. Fast re-transmit and fast recovery have been designed to speed up the recovery of the connection
, without compromising its congestion avoidance characteristics.
Fast Re-transmit and recovery detect a segment loss via duplicate acknowledgements. When a segment is lost, TCP at the receiver will keep sending acknowledgement segments indicating the next expected sequence number. This sequence number would correspond to the lost segment. If only one segment is lost, TCP will keep generating acknowledgements for the following segments. This will result in the transmitter getting duplicate acknowledgements (i.e. acks with the same ack sequence number).
