The increase of the Initial Congestion Window (IW) throughout the land: netdev ML ((Linux Network Development mailing list), TCPM (TCP Modification WG) ML, ICCRP (Congestion Control Research Group WG) ML, TMRG (Traffic Modeling Research Group) ML are a few, undoubtedly the most significant bodies related to TCP all have one thing in common: they all discuss about the (initial) Google proposal to increase IW to 10 or even 16.

I think my position is to this topic is more or less known, this time I want to sum up arguments of other folks. At the end it is a long process to shift the IW to whatever value seems adequate and a lot of research is required to prove/back up the modified IW in the wild.

IW10/IW16 has only verified in the Google (especially Jerry Chu) and Ilpo Jarvinen testlab with SACK enabled sender. There are no analysis how the behavior shifts if SACK is disabled or not available, due to a receiver lack of SACK. But this is only one point of critique. To back up (or revise) my assumption I started today to setup a ns-2 testbed to analyze other corner cases. Especially multihop networks (e.g. MANET) with a bandwidth of a few kbits are of interest. The current simulation provides a OLSR based multihop infrastructure. Now I will start digin into patching the Initial Congestion Window of the network stack as well as think about useful analysis scripts.

And because it is Friday: a Internet LOL-Cat Meme

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