Patent ID: 7613118

Claim:
A method of detecting a change in a transport protocol window size performed by a transmission control protocol (TCP) process in a network element, comprising the computer-implemented steps of: receiving, from a TCP application, a first TCP segment that advertises a first receive window size of zero; determining whether data needs to be sent to the TCP application, and only if so and in response to the receiving and determining: starting a timer; when the timer expires, creating and sending a second TCP segment that contains a first sequence number value equal to a second sequence number of sent but unacknowledged data minus one, and a segment length value of zero; receiving a TCP ACK segment that acknowledges the second TCP segment and that contains a second receive window size; determining whether the second receive window size is greater than a first value that is greater than or equal to one; wherein the first value is based at least in part on a size that prevents data fragmentation; sending the data to the TCP application only when the second receive window size is greater than the first value; incrementing a counter when the data is not sent to the TCP application; and re-performing the steps of creating and sending only when the counter is less than a second value.