Toward Enhanced Reliability: An Efficient Method for Link-Local Retransmission in a Programmable Data Plane

In wide-area networks (WANs) with high-speed, lossless transmission requirements, avoiding packet loss is crucial for ensuring link reliability, and maintaining link utilization over long distances is equally important. In this paper, we explore strategies for leveraging malfunctioning network links through link-local retransmission, optimizing our approach specifically for wide-area networks. To enhance performance, we select the duplicate threshold (dupthresh) based on the mean length deviation, which helps avoid triggering a certain portion of spurious fast retransmissions and reduces link bandwidth usage in an out-of-order environment. We evaluated our implementation on a programmable switch platform and found that this system maintained a low packet loss rate within a 10 Gbps line rate environment. It also reduces false retransmissions by 25% in the case of out-of-order links.