[e2e] Open the floodgate

Cannara cannara at attglobal.net
Thu Apr 22 12:03:03 PDT 2004


There you go again David -- hyperbole...

"If we had Cannara's world, where the entire network was owned by a 
benevolent government monopoly (or one owned by a small number of 
corporations who are free to collude, but never conduct network wars to 
screw each other up), perhaps we could apply traditional control theory..."

Others can certainly get your idea that your ideas are The Ones, but that's
not the point here, now is it?  I know you know the point, and I'd be happy to
pop over to your office to discuss it.  The point is stagnation in network
design, which started long ago in the Internet clan, and is now maintained by
lack of dedication to good engineering.  I notice you avoid responding to all
the various examples of why dedication and responsibility are so important to
well-engineered products.  Did you have some trauma induced by a cold call
from an AT&T network center?  :]

Alex

"David P. Reed" wrote:
> 
> At 07:56 AM 4/22/2004, =?gb2312?q?Jing=20Shen?= wrote:
> >So whatever theoretical model used, mechanism for
> >transmission protocol is  just methods people take in
> >a big game. So, if someone could modify the
> >transmission mechanism to make me a better place in
> >competing game why shouldn't he take it?  So, fairness
> >between new protocol and TCP is not a problem. Maybe
> >"game theory + feedback control" is a better way with
> >transmission protocol analysis.
> 
> I commend all on this list to study the end-to-end protocol called
> BitTorrent - with an open mind.   I think that it is a very interesting
> example of game theory + feedback control, and sad to say, it has captured
> no interest from the theory community and the measurement/simulation community.
> 
> It's a tremendously creative idea to solve a practical problem - and almost
> certainly has flaws that can be discovered by a "disciplined" approach to
> thinking about it.   By analogy, it might teach us about how congestion
> control in routers can be managed as a game - and perhaps how we can deal
> with bad behavior, just as some of the work by people trying to build
> algorithms that work under the "byzantine" assumption or the "exponentially
> spreading attack" assumptions are improving the network.
> 
> If we had Cannara's world, where the entire network was owned by a
> benevolent government monopoly (or one owned by a small number of
> corporations who are free to collude, but never conduct network wars to
> screw each other up), perhaps we could apply traditional control theory
> because errors would be small linear excursions, noise would be white and
> uncorrelated and  the network would be managed by a high-priesthood of (ah
> why pretend?) AT&T employees who are never incompetent, never wrong, and
> powered by lead acid cells in windowless buildings.




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