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Summary: TCP Congestion Control with a Misbehaving Receiver
Stefan Savage, Neal Cardwell, David Wetherall, and Tom Anderson
Department of Computer Science and Engineering
University of Washington, Seattle
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 ar-
bitrarily 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 undesir-
able 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.
1 Introduction
End-to-end congestion control mechanisms, such as those used in
TCP, are the primary means used for sharing scarce bandwidth re-
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