The paper documents "congestion collapse" in the early internet. Too many TCP packets were sent at once, some were dropped, resent, dropped again, resent again, and so on, causing bandwidth to drop. The paper then goes on to present ways to scale the number of packets sent according to the number of packets acknowledged or lost.
Here's one I enjoyed: "Congestion avoidance and control," by Jacobson, 1988. https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/52325.52356
The paper documents "congestion collapse" in the early internet. Too many TCP packets were sent at once, some were dropped, resent, dropped again, resent again, and so on, causing bandwidth to drop. The paper then goes on to present ways to scale the number of packets sent according to the number of packets acknowledged or lost.