Q9Mobile Computing
Question
2 marks
What is fast retransmit/fast recovery in TCP?
Answer
Fast Retransmit completely bypasses the catastrophic TCP timeout timer. If the sender receives three identical duplicate ACKs, it mathematically proves a packet was lost and instantly retransmits it.
In mobile networks, waiting for a 500ms timeout to retransmit a lost packet completely stalls the connection. Fast Retransmit violently detects the gap in sequence numbers, resends the packet immediately, and Fast Recovery mathematically prevents the TCP Congestion Window from collapsing to zero.