TCP congestion control

Transport Layer protocols like TCP and QUIC include a mechanism called Congestion Control. The congestion controller’s main job is to make sure the network isn’t overloaded by too much data at the same time. If that happens the router buffers start overflowing, causing them to drop packets that don’t fit, and we have packet loss. So, what it typically does is start by sending just a little bit of data (usually about 14KB) to see if that makes it through. If the data arrives, the receiver sends acknowledgements back to the sender. As long as all sent data is being acknowledged, the sender doubles its send rate every RTT until a packet loss event is observed (meaning the network is overloaded (a bit) and it needs to back down (a bit)). This is how a TCP connection “probes” for its available bandwidth.