Consider a client application that will establish a connection to server when it detects a electricity disruption event (though physical sensors tapped into the electricity system). The said electricity disruption could also cause some remote network equipment to persistently fail, which lays somewhere in the SYN packet's path, causing the packet to silently lost. The scenario assumes an alternative path exist between client and server, such that the re-transmission(s) of SYN packet can eventually reach the server. However, the normal fast re-transmission algorithm cannot help this situation because the round-trip-time estimator is yet to converge, instead, an rather long initial re-transmission timeout (RTO) is used (typically 3 sec).
The question is: how to achieve faster re-transmission? Of course the trivial solution is to reduce the initial RTO, but without prior knowledge on the RTT, setting an arbitrarily small value is not optimal and potentially leads to unnecessary re-transmissions.
Another question is: Is it necessary to take into account the routing protocol, since it takes time for routing tables to converge to the new topology after link failure.