[e2e] High Packet Loss and TCP

[Christian Huitema]

> >One can argue that this can lead to congestion collapse: if too many
> >connections try to use a too small link, then they will all back-off
to
> >this one packet every 4 second behavior, which may well exceed the
link
> >capacity. Also, the slow progress will lead to many jobs aborted
midway,
> >which is a loss of resource. It has been shown that, in these
> >circumstances, admission control helps: preferably drop the SYN
packets,
> >so that the remaining connections have some bandwidth and can
actually
> >complete.
> 
> Didn't Jon Crowcroft capture some traces from the trans-Atlantic link
> c. 1990 when we had precisely this problem for a few months -- the
> number of packets in the pipe divided by the number of connections was
> less than 1?

Maybe. I believe that the same observation was made more recently on the
connection between India's academic networks and the Internet.

-- Christian Huitema