“The stability of the Internet relies on timeouts. The timeout value, known as the Retransmission TimeOut (RTO), is constantly updated, based on sampling the Round Trip Time (RTT) of each packet as measured by its sender – that is, the time between when the sender transmits a packet and receives a corresponding acknowledgement. Many of the Internet protocols compute those samples via the same sampling mechanism, known as Karn’s Algorithm. We present a formal description of the algorithm, and study its properties.”

Find the paper and the full list of authors in Networked Systems.