Re: [tcpm] Seeking WG opinions on ACKing ACKs with good cause (was: Possible error in accurate-ecn)

[Yoshifumi Nishida <[e-mail]>]

Hi Mirja,

On Tue, Mar 16, 2021 at 9:50 AM Mirja Kuehlewind <[e-mail]>
wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> Actually I think there is no problem if a ACK on an ACK is misinterpreted
> as dup ACK. What happens if a dupACK is detected? The cwnd is decreased and
> lost data is retransmitted. However, the cwnd was either already decreased
> with the first ACK and would not be decreased again for the next RTT (in
> case of Reno-like cc), or should be decreased anyway because the ACK
> carries a new CE feedback. I guess we could note that one should not
> decrease twice because if the information in the same ACK (being dup and CE
> counter). However, there will be no retransmission because there is no
> outstanding non-acked data given the received ack'ed only an ACK and no new
> data. So in summary, there is no problem here with dupACK generated in
> response to a pure CE-marked ACK that needs to be addressed in any way.
>

I personally am not very fine with dup acks is being misinterpreted
This might be another corner case, but here's an example I've thought.

When a sender sent one data packet D1 and bunch of acks (say 30), and D1 is
lost, all acks have CE marks.
In my understanding, this will generate 10 dup acks that request D1 with
(B)
In this case, sender retransmits D1 after 3rd dupacks and it will still
receive 7 dupacks.
These 7 dup acks might trigger another transmission of packets on some
implementations.
This is because RFC5681 states:


.  For each additional duplicate ACK received (after the third),
       cwnd MUST be incremented by SMSS.  This artificially inflates the
       congestion window in order to reflect the additional segment that
       has left the network.


RFC5681 also states:


   since the receiver can only generate a
   duplicate ACK when a segment has arrived, that segment has left the
   network and is in the receiver's buffer, so we know it is no longer
   consuming network resources.


But, I think this doesn't fit the logic in the doc very well. We might
want to add some texts for this if we choose (B)

--
Yoshi