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Re: An alternative to TCP (part 1)

2001-02-06 10:50:03
jag(_at_)kw(_dot_)com(_dot_)cn (Jun'an Gao) writes:

There are two annoying incompetence of TCP.  One is that TCP does
not distinguish packet loss caused by network transmission error
from that caused by network congestion.

But ECN seems to address this issue, and it can work for UDP as well
as TCP.

This results in an unnecessary reduction in link bandwidth
utilization, especially in the environment of wireless physical
links.

One could argue that it's a responsibility of wireless link-layer
protocols to ensure that random loss is rare (say, by employing an
ECC).

The other is that the unit of TCP sequence number is byte (octet)
while the the sequence number is only 32 bit wide.

What practical implications does sequence numbers wrap-around have in
foreseeable future?  At 10Gbps, sequence number space will last for
3.4s, which seems to be larger than your typical round-trip time of a
hundred or two milliseconds.  It seems it could start to be a problem
at 100Gbps speeds, but current trend seems to be to increase the
number of 10Gbps lamdba channels rather than their bandwidth...

-- 
Stanislav Shalunov              http://www.internet2.edu/~shalunov/

I never let school stand in the way of my education.       -- Mark Twain