DCII 5.11.08

Errors show up even after CRC and TCP checksums - see this paper from stanford on
When the CRC and TCP checksum disagree

In round trip estimation, I commented on the obfuscation in the code - see for example this fragment:

/*
* The smoothed round-trip time and estimated variance
* are stored as fixed point numbers scaled by the values below.
* For convenience, these scales are also used in smoothing the average
* (smoothed = (1/scale)sample + ((scale-1)/scale)smoothed).
* With these scales, srtt has 3 bits to the right of the binary point,
* and thus an "ALPHA" of 0.875. rttvar has 2 bits to the right of the
* binary point, and is smoothed with an ALPHA of 0.75.
*/
#define TCP_RTT_SCALE 32 /* multiplier for srtt; 3 bits frac. */
#define TCP_RTT_SHIFT 5 /* shift for srtt; 3 bits frac. */
#define TCP_RTTVAR_SCALE 16 /* multiplier for rttvar; 2 bits */
#define TCP_RTTVAR_SHIFT 4 /* shift for rttvar; 2 bits */
#define TCP_DELTA_SHIFT 2 /* see tcp_input.c */

/*
* The initial retransmission should happen at rtt + 4 * rttvar.
* Because of the way we do the smoothing, srtt and rttvar
* will each average +1/2 tick of bias. When we compute
* the retransmit timer, we want 1/2 tick of rounding and
* 1 extra tick because of +-1/2 tick uncertainty in the
* firing of the timer. The bias will give us exactly the
* 1.5 tick we need. But, because the bias is
* statistical, we have to test that we don't drop below
* the minimum feasible timer (which is 2 ticks).
* This version of the macro adapted from a paper by Lawrence
* Brakmo and Larry Peterson which outlines a problem caused
* by insufficient precision in the original implementation,
* which results in inappropriately large RTO values for very
* fast networks.
*/
#define TCP_REXMTVAL(tp) \
max((tp)->t_rttmin, (((tp)->t_srtt >> (TCP_RTT_SHIFT - TCP_DELTA_SHIFT)) \
+ (tp)->t_rttvar) >> TCP_DELTA_SHIFT)



In processing acknowledgements, the congestion window needs to be evaluated - here's another fairly compact piece of code that does some of this work (opening the window as data is acked)

/*
* When new data is acked, open the congestion window.
* If the window gives us less than ssthresh packets
* in flight, open exponentially (maxseg per packet).
* Otherwise open linearly: maxseg per window
* (maxseg^2 / cwnd per packet).
*/
{
register u_int cw = tp->snd_cwnd;
register u_int incr = tp->t_maxseg;

if (cw > tp->snd_ssthresh)
incr = incr * incr / cw;