Congestion Window

In Transmission Control Protocol (TCP), the congestion window is one of the factors that determines the number of bytes that can be outstanding at any time. This is not to be confused with the TCP window size which is maintained by the receiver. This is a means of stopping the link between two places from getting overloaded with too much traffic. The size of this window is calculated by estimating how much congestion there is between the two places. The sender maintains the congestion window.

When a connection is set up, the congestion window is set to the maximum segment size (MSS) allowed on that connection. Further variance in the congestion window is dictated by an Additive Increase/Multiplicative Decrease approach.

This means that if all segments are received and the acknowledgments reach the sender on time, some constant is added to the window size. The window keeps growing exponentially until a timeout occurs or the receiver reaches its limit (a threshold value "ssthresh"). After this the congestion window increases linearly at the rate of 1/(congestion window)packets on each new acknowledgement received.

On timeout:

1. Congestion window is reset to 1 MSS
2. "ssthresh" is set to half the window size before packet loss started
3. "slow start" is initiated.

A system administrator may adjust the maximum window size limit, or adjust the constant added during additive increase, as part of TCP tuning.

The flow of data over a TCP connection is also controlled by the use of the receiver advertised TCP Receive Window. By comparing its own congestion window with the receive window of the receiver, a sender can determine how much data it may send at any given time.