TCP Behavior and Congestion Control Questions

Deep understanding of Transmission Control Protocol dynamics, reliability, and congestion control and how they affect application performance. Topics include slow start, congestion avoidance, fast retransmit and fast recovery, window scaling and maximum segment size interactions, retransmission timer behavior, selective acknowledgements, and the effects of different congestion control algorithms such as cubic and bottleneck bandwidth and round trip propagation time. Candidates should be able to explain interactions with buffer sizing and bufferbloat, middleboxes and encryption, measurement techniques using packet traces and flow telemetry, and mitigations for tail loss and high latency scenarios.