Experience with Link-Up Notification Over a Mobile Satellite Link Martin Duke, Thomas R. Henderson, Jeff Meegan Boeing Phantom Works {martin.duke,thomas.r.henderson,jeff.r.meegan}@boeing.com Abstract Over paths characterized by extended outage periods, a TCP connection can suffer a severe performance penalty due to its Retransmission Timeout (RTO) backoff mechanism. If outages are long enough, the RTO can grow large enough to cause unacceptably long pauses when the link is eventually restored. One proposed solution is Link-Up Notification (LUN), which involves an intermediate device that can detect the link state. When the link is restored, the device immediately sends a packet that causes traffic to resume, terminating the TCP timeout. We have implemented a version of LUN that we call kickstart. A kickstart gateway buffers a packet from each connection and uses them to restart the connections when the channel is restored. Based on empirical data, we have built a mobile satellite channel emulator and demonstrated how the technique can effectively eliminate the pause in restarting a TCP flow once a blocked channel is reestablished. When conducting experiments with shorter channel outages and shorter TCP flows, a different picture emerges; in this case, while connection transfer times are not noticeably
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