Reducing the TCP Acknowledgment Frequency

Overview

Delayed acknowledgments were introduced to conserve network and host resources. Further reduction of the acknowledgment frequency can be motivated in the same way. However, reducing the dependency on frequent acknowledgments in TCP is difficult because acknowledgments support reliable delivery, loss recovery, clock out new segments, and serve as input when determining an appropriate sending rate. The results show that in scenarios where there are no obvious advantages of reducing the acknowledgment frequency, performance can be maintained although fewer acknowledgments are sent.