A Competitive Analysis for Retransmission Timeout

Protocols that provide reliable communicationon top of a network that can lose packets rely on periodically retransmitting packets. The choice of retransmission timeout critically a ects system performance. This paper presents a rst step toward a theoretical study of the choice of retransmission timeout, based on competitive analysis. In general, competitive analysis compares the performance of an on-line algorithm to the performance of an optimal o -line algorithm, which has access to more information. In this context, the job of an algorithm is to choose the retransmission timeout interval; an o -line algorithm knows the exact message delays, while an on-line algorithm only knows upper and lower bounds on the delays. The performance measure of interest is the expected value of a linear combination of the number of packets used and the amount of time elapsed. An on-line algorithm for choosing the retransmission timeout is presented that is optimal with respect to the di erence betwee...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1995
• Where: ICDCS
• Authors: Shlomi Dolev, Michael Kate, Jennifer L. Welch
• Keywords: -line Algorithm, Distributed And Parallel Computing, ICDCS 1995, On-line Algorithm, Retransmission Timeout