Subject: Protocol Action: An Extension to the Selective Acknowledgement (SACK) Option for TCP to Proposed Standard

From: The IESG <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 31 May 2000 07:56:24 -0400

The IESG has approved the Internet-Draft 'An Extension to the Selective
Acknowledgement (SACK) Option for TCP' <draft-floyd-sack-00.txt> as a
Proposed Standard.  This document is the product of the Transport Area
Working Group Working Group.  The IESG contact persons are Scott
Bradner and Allison Mankin.

Technical Summary
 
 This document defines an extension to SACK that allows a TCP receiver to
 communicate to the sender that it received multiple copies of data spanning
 a particular range of sequence numbers.  This information allows the sender
 to infer when it has unnecessarily retransmitted a packet.  A TCP sender
 could then use this information for more robust operation in an environment
 of reordered packets, ACK loss, packet replication, and/or early retransmit
 timeouts, though how it might do so is beyond the scope of this document.

Working Group Summary

 The only issue raised with the document was whether its status should
 be Experimental rather than Proposed.  On advice from the TSV directorate,
 the chairs/ADs concluded that the change is sufficiently minor, yet useful,
 that Proposed is warranted.

Protocol Quality

 Vern Paxson reviewed the spec for the IESG.