At 8:45 AM -0400 10/7/97, Mark Allman wrote:
>... Some people have said that
>we can/should design mechanisms whereby we can tell why a packet was
>dropped (congestion or corruption). Personally, I remain
>unconvinced this will work well (it can never completely work; who
>does a machine tell when it receives a corrupted packet? it can
>never be sure the right host is being told, as the packet is
>corrupt). I may be wrong, it is a research area at best. In the
>absence of such a mechanism, we must choose conservativly and
>therefore take the drop as congestion and backoff.
I hear from the IPv6 folk that the latest protocol spec's talk of the
routers setting a congestion bit. If that were done, and if everybody were
to speak IPv6 (let's not hold our breath) TCP would be able to tell the
difference between a packet dropped because of congestion and one lost to
corruption.
--Steve G.
____________________________________________
Steve Goldstein, National Science Foundation
+1(703)306-1949 Ext. 1119
"Let's not procrastinate until next week!"
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Mon Feb 14 2000 - 16:14:30 EST