Following two schemes are used :

 1.     Fast Retransmit

 2.     Fast Recovery

 When a source sends a segment TCP sets a timer. If this value is set too low it will result in many unnecessary treransmissions. If set too high it results in wastage of banwidth and hence lower throughput. In Fast Retransmit scheme the timer value is set fairly higher than the RTT. The sender can therefore detect segment loss before the timer expires. This scheme presumes that the sender will get repeated ACK for a lost packet.

 Round Trip Time (RTT): In Internet environment the segments may travel acrossdifferent intermediate networks and through multiple routers. The networks and routers may have different delays, which may vary over time. The RTT therefore is also variable. It makes difficult to set timers. TCP allows varying timers by using an adaptive retransmission algorithm. It works as follows.

 1.     Note the time (t1) when a segment is sent and the time (t2) when its ACK is received.

 2.     Compute RTT(sample) = (t 2 – t 1 )

 3.     Again Compute RTT(new) for next segment.

 4.     Compute Average RTT by weighted average of old and new values of RTT

 5.     RTT(est) = a *RTT(old) + (1-a) * RTT (new) where 0 < a < 1

 A high value of ‘a’ makes the estimated RTT insensitive to changes that last for a short time and RTT relies on the history of the network. A low value makes it sensitive to current state of the network. A typical value of ‘a’ is 0.75

 6.     Compute Time Out = b * RTT(est) where b> 1 A low value of ‘b’ will ensure quick detection of a packet loss. Any small delay will however cause unnecessary retransmission. A typical value of ‘b’ is kept at .2