On Fri, 1 Mar 2002, John Stracke wrote:
Try this one: while in your hotel room, you see there's something you need
to download. By the time you get dressed, it's still coming down; and you
have to go to a meeting. If you're using Mobile IP, you may be able to
move from one network to another before the TCP connection dies.
There is another alternative way to solve this: an "assocation" layer
above TCP that allows application/client-to-application/server
communications to span a sequence of lifetimes of underlying transports.
Yes, this would require reworking many existing application protocols.
(In some cases that might be a good thing. ;-)
The actual assocation protocol is actually pretty simple - it really
amounts to an exchange of tokens between the two ends so that they have an
agreed upon fallback point should they need to re-establish the transport
and resume. The protocol engines themselves need not store any data - the
applications themselves are responsible for holding enough to resume from
the last agreed upon token. My guess is that something like this could be
readily incorporated into beep if it isn't there already.
--karl--