[e2e] Estimating MS windows RTO equation

[Detlef Bosau]

Marco Mellia wrote:
> 
> We are working on the same topic, identifying packet anomalies (e.g.
> retransmissions) in a TCP flow from passive measurement.
> If you are interested, here are the links on the papers that we'll be
> presented in June at ICC


It would be interesting to see whether you will create a trace "what are
spurious timeouts" in GPRS ;-) *SCNR*

To be serious: It would not be interesting to understand, what an SRTO
really _is_, but it would be helpful to see, whether those practically
occur.
If you look at the technical report "TCP Spurious Timeout estimation in
an operational GPRS/UMTS network" by 
Francesco Vacirca, Thomas Ziegler and Eduard Hasenleithner, the authors
do passive measurements of the particular anomalie "spurious timeout"
and end up in the observation that these do hardly occur in reality. If
this is correct, particularly the importance of SRTO
has been drastically overestimated during the past few years.

So, what I think would be particularly interesting in a work like yours
is that we are able to discrimate important problems from
non important / neglectible ones.

It´s perhaps not that important to have an "OS identifying mechanism".
IIRC there are quite a few papers around on this matter
and to my understanding, this is more some kind of (necessary! and
sophisticated!) debugging than "pure science".

However, it is very important to find out whether e.g. SRTO are reality
or not. Spoken more drastically: If someone rides
the SRTO horse once again, does he ride a dead horse?

This question is somewhat off topic for this thread, however I´m very
interested in this topic. BTW: My personal expectation
is that SRTO _ARE_ a dead horse.

Detlef

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Detlef Bosau
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