Re draft-ietf-tcpsat-res-issues-02.txt
I finally got a chance to read the latest draft. An area of interest to
me is TCP spoofing (since it is included in several of our products). I think
the existing TCP spoofing section is pretty good, getting the idea across
without touching on specifics (an important point since many versions of
spoofing do exist). One of our products is capable of achieving TCP
throughput (using spoofing) of up to 2.5 Mbps on links with an RTT of as long
as 2 seconds. If it is worthwhile to include such a high speed example in the
draft, I can provide more details.
What I really wanted to offer up, though, is an observation. The product
I work with is mainly used to implement private networks. But, I think this
observation is going to eventually carry over into the Internet. What we are
finding is that our customers are starting to do a lot of stuff on top of UDP
in order to get around perceived limits of TCP. They simply implement their
own error recovery, etc. on top of UDP. (Also, I know of at least one product
(not ours) which implements TCP spoofing by converting it to UDP over the
WAN.) Using UDP totally bypasses TCP congestion control. This is not so bad
with a private network where other methods of congestion control can be
implemented. But, if this does start showing up in the Internet, it might
cause a lot of problems. I guess I am just offering this up as another reason
why we need to solve some of the perceived TCP problems related to long delay
paths...
John Border/Hughes Network Systems
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Mon Feb 14 2000 - 16:14:36 EST