A Simple Method to Overcome the Restriction of the SACK Blocks' Number in SACK TCP

By definition of RFC 2018, each segments block of data queued at the data receiver is defined in the SACK option by two 32-bit unsigned integers in network byte order. Since TCP Options field has a 40-byte maximum length, when error bursts occur we note that the limitation of maximum available option space may not be sufficient to report all blocks present in the receiver's queue and lead to unnecessarily force the TCP sender to retransmit packets that have actually been received but not carried related information in SACK option field. For overcoming this restriction, in this paper, a new solution is designed to further improve the performance of TCP SACK and prevent those unwanted retransmissions. Simulation result shows that the implementation of our proposal is effective.