> Signalling congestion by deliberately dropping packets when buffer
> space is still available has always bothered me. There has to be a
> better way. Besides, I'm of the opinion that there's just no
> alternative to having lots and lots of router buffering, especially on
> high speed/long delay links. If a TCP sends a packet into a
> bottlenecked path with generous link buffering, the worst that happens
> is that the packet waits in the queue for awhile. The link continues
> to pass traffic at full capacity. But if TCP timidly shrinks its
> congestion window to avoid packet drops in memory-starved routers,
> that increases the chance of the link going idle even when the TCPs
> have traffic to send. Idle link time is gone forever.
Actually, something else could happen. TCP could retransmit a segment
which has not actually been lost and is still sitting in the router
queue. But, this seems like an extreme case...
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Mon Feb 14 2000 - 16:14:38 EST