Re: Three states for a binary bit (was Re: TCP (and SCTP) sucks onhigh speed networks)

[Alhussein Abouzeid <hussein@ee.washington.edu>]

On Tue, 5 Dec 2000, David P. Reed wrote:

> Guys - the real problem is that you keep acting like congestion is a 
> property of the network.  It isn't.  It is a property of the sources' 
> behavior (trying to put 10 lbs of s*** in a 5 lb bag).

It is an "outcome" of the sources' behavior reads better, doesn't it?

The shared resources are in the network (capacity, buffer,..etc.) not the
sources. Ofcourse, the sources can go a long way in relieving network
congestion. But first, they need to know about it. In the absence of any
signaling from the network (other than dropping packets when congestion
happens) and in the prescence of random packet errors, I don't see how
"intelligent" source algorithms can make clearly "intelligent" decisions.


> It's lazy and arrogant to presume that the network designer knows what the 
> users need in a resource allocation algorithm, such as managing "congestion".

In my humble opinion, it's not a good practice to call the designers of
existing network algorithms, or anybody for that matter, lazy or arrogant.

It is well known by now that one can not rely on the
sources ALONE to avoid congestion - it might have worked in the old days
when there were a dozen "nice" people using the
Internet. Non-cooperative games theory have not yet
provided a solution for this problem (if it has, please provide
a pointer). 

-Hussein.