Experiments on six commercial TCP implementations using a software fault injection tool

TCP, the de facto standard transport protocol in today’s operating systems, is a very robust protocol that adapts to various network characteristics, packet loss, link congestion, and even significant differences in vendor implementations. This paper describes a set of experiments performed on six different vendor TCP implementations using ORCHESTRA, a tool for testing and fault injection of communication protocols. These experiments uncovered violations of the TCP protocol specification, and illustrated differences in the philosophies of various vendors in their implementations of TCP. The paper summarizes several lessons learned about the TCP implementations through these experiments. 1997 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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