Using the ECN Nonce to Detect Spurious Loss Events in TCP

A sudden delay spike or reordering in the network can cause TCP to experience a loss event. Since loss is interpreted as a sign of congestion in TCP, this causes the protocol to reduce its sending rate. Several mechanisms for detecting and reacting to such spurious loss events have been proposed; each of them has some advantages and disadvantages. We extend this space with a new detection mechanism which complements the existing ones well. Furthermore, the mechanism is easy to implement because it only needs the sender to intelligently interpret feedback from ECN nonce.