[e2e] Open the floodgate

[Jon Crowcroft]

let me just clarify what i was reacting to, as some people may not recall the XTP 
debate, and I may also have misinterpreted noel's use of the term.

XTP suffered from several problems, not just the kitchen sink and bandwagon, but also from a massive NIH
allergy it incurred in the early e2e community (nih != national institute of health, although they could well do
with initiating a study into Not Invented Here syndrome for psychological well being reasons).

XTP contained several ideas on protocol implementation, which, while a little underbaked, were quite cutting edge
(remember we are talking 85/86 here) - for example, they revisted the integration of layers 3/4 (and 2 on LANs) as
did VMTP, and this was for a variety of reasons we now understand to be good (performance by cutting layer crossing
overheads - viz clark/tenennhouse ILP/ALF work) - they revisited rate versus window and had the packet train idea
(see also VMTP, Netblt and so on) which retains stat mux properties when goign through a set of routers with other
bursty traffic, but could (if done right) lead to smoother rate varation than the AIMD work that dominated shortly
afterwards until recently. They looked at hardware accelerators (see work on packet processors from many in last
few years, again, e.g. Intel, Procket etc). they even looked at trying to understand protocol correctness. The
design was modular (component oriented transport has reappeared inthe IETF in the RMT working group) and they
provided relaible multicast, with network information so that source routed messages could be used to avert
problems with retransmits and so on and so on....
connection management (and i already mentioned dccp, sctp with different multiplexing goals, and should probably
also have said xcp) is something else that has been revisited in the light of persistence, different session
lifetime models, different attacks to concern oursleves with, nat traversal and stateful 'firewall/router' world  
to worry ourselves with...

aside from the personality problems (and you can find the tech. debates on e2e archives and elsewhere
comp.protocols.somethingorother probably, even alt.disorder.internet i expect), the committee/bandwagon effect, and
just Too Many Things at one go doomed it....

but in the community that were the True Defenders of the One Faith of TCP, it became short hand for "Bad Idea" - i
think i may be being a bit of a revisionist, but I dont think One True Fair, or Bad Idea type discussions help us
with moving along. there are pieces of XTP worth understanding....

and there are other protocols worth reading up on (TP4, delta-t, VMTP, etc) which also have things to offer. and we
need to stay abrest of the new techniques (control theory for rate and window management, information theory for
transmssion on wireless) that mean we can do things that were NOT done in the past, or if done, only understood 
through a glass, darkly

anyhow, back on topic, the Binary Increase/search stuff (as per infocom paper) is one of several (see Injong,s FAQ)
attempts to revist the throughput for networks with bandwidth/delay products we could only dream of in the 1980s,
but with loss rates we were all too familiar with...

btw, I just spent 1 hour last night talking to a New Scientist journalist who had got a bee in his bonnett about 
The GRID being a great potential threat to world security - I am just waiting for the headline
"SuperComputers on the Internet-  Are Weapons of Mass Destruction already amongst us?"
or some such tosh:-)


In missive <4085EA1C.A0790398 at attglobal.net>, Cannara typed:

 >>2nd to that Jon.  Enough decades have passed for TCP improvements to be
 >>allowed without knee-jerk dismissal of ideas, even if they're other than
 >>committee-approved works of 'genius', say like IPv6.  Of course, TCP is just
 >>one part of the flow and the problem these days.
 >>
 >>Alex
 >>
 >>Jon Crowcroft wrote:
 >>> 
 >>> I'm not sure what your point is
 >>> 
 >>> XTP had a LOT of good ideas but was a kitchen sink protocol
 >>> by the time everyone climbedon the bandwagon
 >>> 
 >>> TCP has a few good ideas - most of which were NOT n the original design - for exasmple despite Postel's wortk on
 >>> correctlness using petri nets, t here were several bugs in the state machine (see ian heavens (RIP) discovery
 >>> relatively late) plus the byte stream nature and lack of optimal packet exchange or nonce/syn cookie meant that
 >>> there were loadds of KNOWN attacks (with known solutons)
 >>> 
 >>> all the stuff vj did on header prediction/40 instricton per packet, and criag and others on rtt estimation, and
 >>> the berkeley/kk ramakrishanna/raj jain/vh congestion control was dne welll after the oritinal work and coudl (and
 >>> WAS ) donr to other protocols too (decnet transport)
 >>> 
 >>> the actual work on BIC (as opposed to the crap written by the reporter) is a delta to TCP much like FAST,
 >>> scaleable, highspeed, all of which the real work cites...
 >>> 
 >>> i wonder if you have ever read vinnecombe's control theoretic work on TCP, or the dccp and sctp work on secure cx
 >>> setup, or the stuff people have actually invented since the boring old farts like thee and me actually had a new
 >>> idea...there are people trying to move right along, despute carping or journalism, and it ill behoves us to diss
 >>> them without reading more.
 >>> stet
 >>>

 cheers

   jon