RE: early packet train discard?
Tom Anderson (tom@emigrant)
Thu, 21 May 1998 14:11:18 -0700 (PDT)
With strict go-back-N, once you drop a packet from a TCP flow,
you could be better off dropping every future packet from that flow,
until you see the next retransmit of the dropped packet.
After all, with stream semantics, you can't use the later packets
until the earlier packet gets delivered. If we assume this
is the only congested switch in the flow, then you could argue
that it would be better to drop aggressively now, if the congestion at
the switch might be lower later. Akin to JZ's drop all or none.
Of course, this mucks with fast retransmit. But it seems strange to
transmit a packet simply so an dupack can be generated in the reverse
direction -- why is this any different than ECN?
An interesting study would be whether this would be better than sack.
tom