Improving the TCP Retransmission Timer Adjustment Mechanism for Constrained IoT Networks

Abstract

TCP is considered as one of the major candidate transport protocols even for constrained IoT networks..In our previous work, we investigated the congestion control mechanism of the uIP TCP. Since the uIP TCP sets the window size to one segment by default, managing the retransmission timer is the primary approach to congestion control. However, the original uIP TCP sets the retransmission timer based on the fixed RTO, it performs poorly when a radio duty cycling mechanism is enabled and the hidden terminal problem is severe. In our previous work, we proposed a TCP retransmission timer adjustment scheme for uIP TCP which adopts the notion of weak RTT estimation of CoCoA, exponential backoffs with variable limits, and dithering. Although our previous work showed that the proposed retransmission timer adjustment scheme can improve performance, we observe that the scheme often causes a node to set the retransmission timer for an excessively too long time period. In this work, we show that slightly modifying the dithering mechanism of the previous scheme is effective for improving TCP fairness.