Acknowledgment on Demand for Transport Control

Tong Li, Kai Zheng, Ke Xu, Yong Cui

Abstract: The dependence on frequent acknowledgments (ACKs) is an artifact of current transport protocol designs rather than a fundamental requirement. Frequent ACKs waste resources when the overhead of ACKs is nonnegligible. However, reducing the number of ACKs may hurt transport performance. “Tame ACK” is an on-demand ACK mechanism that seeks to minimize ACK frequency, which is exactly what is required by transport.