To trigger the sorcerer’s apprentice phenomenon, a duplicate data frame must cross somewhere in the network with the previous ACK for that frame.If both sender and receiver adopt a resend-on-timeout strategy,
with the same timeout interval
, and an ACK is lost, then both sender and receiver will indeed retransmit at about the same time. Whether these retransmissions are synchronized enough that they cross in the network depends another factors; it helps to have some modest latency delay or else slow hosts.With the right conditions, however, the sorcerer’s apprentice phenomenon can be reliably reproduced.