TCP retransmission timer adjustment mechanism using system identification

In this paper, the TCP retransmission timer adjustment mechanism is approached from the system's theoretic point of view. TCP uses a simple recursive system identification algorithm to capture both time variant and time invariant Internet behavior and provides a dynamic round-trip time (RTT) predictor. Based on real Internet data collection, it is observed that when the retransmission timer is adjusted by using the proposed predictor instead of the traditional RTT estimator, its performance increases significantly.