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A Formal Analysis of Karn’s Algorithm

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Networked Systems (NETYS 2023)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 14067))

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Abstract

The stability of the Internet relies on timeouts. The timeout value, known as the Retransmission TimeOut (RTO), is constantly updated, based on sampling the Round Trip Time (RTT) of each packet as measured by its sender – that is, the time between when the sender transmits a packet and receives a corresponding acknowledgement. Many of the Internet protocols compute those samples via the same sampling mechanism, known as Karn’s Algorithm.

We present a formal description of the algorithm, and study its properties. We prove the computed samples reflect the RTT of some packets, but it is not always possible to determine which. We then study some of the properties of RTO computations as described in the commonly used RFC6298. All properties are mechanically verified.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Some implementations of TCP use additional types of acknowledgements, yet, the cumulative ones are common to TCP implementations.

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Acknowledgments

This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant CCS-2140207, SHF-1918429, CNS-1801546, and GRFP-1938052, as well as by the Department of Defense under Grant W911NF2010310.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Northeastern University, Boston, MA, USA

    Max von Hippel & Cristina Nita-Rotaru

  2. University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, USA

    Kenneth L. McMillan

  3. University of Illinois Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA

    Lenore D. Zuck

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  1. Max von Hippel
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  2. Kenneth L. McMillan
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  3. Cristina Nita-Rotaru
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  4. Lenore D. Zuck
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Correspondence to Max von Hippel .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Central Florida, Orlando, FL, USA

    David Mohaisen

  2. New York University, New York, NY, USA

    Thomas Wies

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von Hippel, M., McMillan, K.L., Nita-Rotaru, C., Zuck, L.D. (2023). A Formal Analysis of Karn’s Algorithm. In: Mohaisen, D., Wies, T. (eds) Networked Systems. NETYS 2023. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 14067. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-37765-5_4

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