[lwip-devel] [bug #27445] PCB hangs in Fast Retransmit due to unchanging cwnd

[Sean Malloy]

URL:
  <http://savannah.nongnu.org/bugs/?27445>

                 Summary: PCB hangs in Fast Retransmit due to unchanging cwnd
                 Project: lwIP - A Lightweight TCP/IP stack
            Submitted by: smalloy
            Submitted on: Mon 14 Sep 2009 04:25:02 PM GMT
                Category: TCP
                Severity: 3 - Normal
              Item Group: Faulty Behaviour
                  Status: None
                 Privacy: Public
             Assigned to: None
             Open/Closed: Open
         Discussion Lock: Any
         Planned Release: 
            lwIP version: Other

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Details:

I'm running 1.3.1, modified to simulate remote-end packet drops.  (There's a
1/1000 chance that I'll drop 3 packets in a row every time *if_output() is
called).

The symptoms:

After a short period of time, communication on the pcb would freeze.  The PCB
would show that TF_INFR was set, that the unacked queue was empty, and that
there were several segments present on the unsent queue.

tcp_output was being called on the PCB, but no traffic was going on the wire.
 This was because I was failing to enter the while loop around
tcp_do_output_nagle() because cwnd was set to 1*MSS.  The unsent queue was
never being drained, and we were dead in the water.

The problem:

RFC2581, Section 3.2, bullet point 3 says: 

   3.  For each additional duplicate ACK received, increment
       cwnd by SMSS.  This artificially inflates the congestion
       window in order to reflect the additional segment that
       has left the network.

tcp_receive is structured so that cwnd will not inflate with every duplicate
ACK once a retransmit has been done (that is, once unacked is NULL, and
everything has been moved to the unsent queue with TF_INFR set).  If one of
the retransmitted packets is also lost and cwnd is too small for transmission,
cwnd will never grow to the point where lwip will attempt to re-retransmit the
packets on the unsent queue.

Proposed solution

Making the following change to tcp_receive() will cause cwnd to grow with
every duplicate ACK, regardless of whether or not a retransmit has already
been attempted.

I am unsure of the other implications of this change.

770,771c770,771
<         if (pcb->dupacks >= 3) {
<           if (!(pcb->flags & TF_INFR) && pcb->unacked != NULL) {
---
>         if (pcb->dupacks >= 3 && pcb->unacked != NULL) {
>           if (!(pcb->flags & TF_INFR)) {






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