Retransmission Behavior

TCP uses the following exponential backoff behavior to determine the RTO of successive retransmissions of the same segment:

  1. When the TCP segment is initially sent, the RTO for the segment is set to the currently known RTO for the connection.

  2. After RTO number of seconds, when the RTO expires, the segment RTO is set to twice the RTO for the segment’s previous transmission and retransmitted.

Step 2 is repeated for the maximum number of retransmissions before the TCP connection is abandoned. The TcpMaxDataRetransmissions registry value controls the maximum number of retransmissions for TCP in Windows Server 2008 and Windows Vista.

TcpMaxDataRetransmissions

Location: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM \CurrentControlSet\Services\Tcpip\Parameters ...

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