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TCP congestion control with a misbehaving receiver

Published: 05 October 1999 Publication History
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  • Abstract

    In this paper, we explore the operation of TCP congestion control when the receiver can misbehave, as might occur with a greedy Web client. We first demonstrate that there are simple attacks that allow a misbehaving receiver to drive a standard TCP sender arbitrarily fast, without losing end-to-end reliability. These attacks are widely applicable because they stem from the sender behavior specified in RFC 2581 rather than implementation bugs. We then show that it is possible to modify TCP to eliminate this undesirable behavior entirely, without requiring assumptions of any kind about receiver behavior. This is a strong result: with our solution a receiver can only reduce the data transfer rate by misbehaving, thereby eliminating the incentive to do so.

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      Published In

      cover image ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review
      ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review  Volume 29, Issue 5
      October 1999
      73 pages
      ISSN:0146-4833
      DOI:10.1145/505696
      Issue’s Table of Contents

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      Association for Computing Machinery

      New York, NY, United States

      Publication History

      Published: 05 October 1999
      Published in SIGCOMM-CCR Volume 29, Issue 5

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