Importance

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Abstract

As part of managing delivery of a given packet flow according to a reliable transport protocol, a sender sends, to a receiver, a last flow packet among multiple flow packets of a flowlet. After sending the last flow packet but before satisfaction of a timeout condition for the last flow packet, the sender sends one or more end-of-flowlet (“EOF”) packets, which can be flush packets, query packets, or another type of packet. The sender receives, from the receiver, feedback metadata for the EOF packet(s) and updates a tracking window based at least in part on the feedback metadata. The sender selectively resends one or more unacknowledged flow packets according to the updated tracking window. In this way, the sender can quickly address any dropped packets or significantly delayed packets at the end of a flowlet, without waiting for the timeout condition to detect the dropped or delayed packets.

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First Claim