Re: Predicting Successful Marriages [Gottman]

Dave Long (dl@silcom.com)
Fri, 25 Jun 1999 18:17:25 -0700


Looking at the parallels between trust in a relationship and the role of
windowing in transport protocols, we can recover some of Gottman's results
from the literature on the TCP:

- send window updates: even if you don't have any new data you can still
spontaneously send ACKs and window updates.

- do fast restarts: adjust the window downwards on an error, but make sure to
resend enough to keep the (estimated) pipe full.

- use a persist timeout: if the window has been too small for too long, you
probably lost an ACK. Be willing to send window probes.

- consider selective ACK: a single packet error doesn't mean the rest of the
receive window is bad. Go ahead and ACK the successful sequences.

-Dave