While calculating RTT for each packet in Wireshark, it occurs to me that several packets sent may have less corresponding respond packets. For example, as shown in the figure attached to this question, the client sent packet #10 and #11, but will only receive packet #14 as a response. The server returns the ACK# of #11, so how can I determine the RTT for #10? Will this be regarded as one transmission round or two?
Tcp – In TCP, does a client side packet have RTT since the server will send a cumulative ACK instead of ACK for each packet
tcp
Best Answer
I'm not sure this really answers your question, but keep in mind that TCP spends its time trying to determine the RTT of the network, not that of each packet. The packet RTTs are a means to end.
TCP implementations have all kinds of special cases to handle RTT estimations in the presence of different events : retransmissions, multiple retransmissions, etc... the difficulty being to ignore things that would give you a poor RTT estimation, but not ignore events that would signal an actual substantial change in the network RTT.
So in the case of cumulative ACKs, most likely TCP will just ignore packet #10 and can determine the RTT from packets #11 and #14.