Differences between TCP and Go Back N

networkingprotocolstcp

I was reading Computer Networking from Kurose, and while reading in the TCP chapter about the differences between TCP and Go Back N I found something that I don't fully understand. The book says the following about some of the differences between the two protocols:

"many TCP implementations buffer correctly received but out-of-order segs rather than discard.

also, suppose a seqof segs 1, 2, …N, are received correctively in-order,ACK(n),
n < N, gets lost, and remaining N-1 acks arrive at sender before their respective timeouts
TCP retransmit most one seg, i.e., seg n, instead of pkts, n, n+1, …, N
TCP wouldn’t even retransmit seg n if ACK(n+1) arrived before timeout for seg n"

I understand the buffering of out-of-order segments, but I don't understand the other behavior, and I think it is because I don't fully understand Go Back N. Following that example, if ACK(n+t) arrives before Go Back N timeout, the protocol would continue as if seg n was in fact received, which is the case, because of the accumulative ACKS… so, Go Back N wouldn't retransmit that segment either…. or am I missing something?

Best Answer

I was looking at this question's answer and after finding it I thought even though this is old, it might help someone, so I copied a fragment from Kurose-Ross Computer Networking - A top down approach:

Is TCP a GBN or an SR protocol? Recall that TCP acknowledgments are cumulative and correctly received but out-of-order segments are not individually ACKed by the receiver. Consequently, the TCP sender need only maintain the smallest sequence number of a transmitted but unacknowledged byte (SendBase) and the sequence number of the next byte to be sent (NextSeqNum). In this sense, TCP looks a lot like a GBN-style protocol. But there are some striking differences between TCP and Go-Back-N. Many TCP implementations will buffer correctly received but out-of-order segments [Stevens 1994]. Consider also what happens when the sender sends a sequence of segments 1, 2, . . . , N, and all of the segments arrive in order without error at the receiver. Further suppose that the acknowledgment for packet n < N gets lost, but the remaining N – 1 acknowledgments arrive at the sender before their respective timeouts. In this example, GBN would retransmit not only packet n, but also all of the subsequent packets n + 1, n + 2, . . . , N. TCP, on the other hand, would retransmit at most one segment, namely, segment n. Moreover, TCP would not even retransmit segment n if the acknowledgment for segment n + 1 arrived before the timeout for segment n.

My conclusion: in practice TCP is a mixture between both GBN and SR.

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