The persist timer is used in TCP toa)To detect crashes from the other ...
Understanding the TCP Persist Timer
The TCP persist timer plays a crucial role in maintaining reliable connections, particularly in scenarios where data transmission might be interrupted or stalled.
Purpose of the Persist Timer
- The persist timer is primarily designed to prevent deadlock conditions in TCP connections.
- A deadlock can occur when one side of the connection has sent a segment and is waiting for an acknowledgment (ACK), while the other side has no data to send because it is waiting for a window to open, thus blocking further communication.
How the Persist Timer Works
- When a sender receives a zero window size advertisement from the receiver, it must stop sending data.
- The sender then starts the persist timer. If the timer expires before receiving a non-zero window size advertisement, the sender will send a probe (usually a zero-length segment) to check if the receiver's window has opened up.
- This probing mechanism helps in avoiding indefinite stalling of the connection.
Importance of Avoiding Deadlocks
- By using the persist timer, TCP ensures that the connection does not remain idle indefinitely due to a lack of data flow.
- This feature is particularly important in scenarios where one side may be temporarily unable to receive data, ensuring that the connection can recover and continue transmitting data once the receiver is ready.
Conclusion
In summary, the correct answer is indeed option 'C' as the persist timer is fundamentally used to avoid deadlock conditions in TCP connections, allowing for efficient and reliable data transmission.
The persist timer is used in TCP toa)To detect crashes from the other ...
Concept:
- TCP uses the persistence timer to deal with a zero-window-size.
- Zero-window-size occurs when the TCP sender receives an acknowledgement with a window of size zero. And this is when the persistence timer starts.
- When this timer goes off, the TCP sender sends a special segment called probe.
- This probe causes the receiving TCP to resend the acknowledgment which was lost.
Explanation:
Consider the following situation
- Sender receives an acknowledgment from the receiver with zero window size. This indicates the sender to wait.
- Later, receiver updates the window size and sends the segment with the update to the sender. This segment gets lost.
- Now, both sender and receiver keep waiting for each other to do something. To deal with such a situation, TCP uses a persistent timer.
- Sender starts the persistent timer on receiving an ACK from the receiver with a zero-window size. When persistent timer goes off, sender sends a special segment to the receiver. This special segment is called as probe segment and contains only 1 byte of new data.
- Response sent by the receiver to the probe segment gives the updated window size. If the updated window size is non-zero, it means data can be sent now. If the updated window size is still zero, the persistent timer is set again and the cycle repeats.