[e2e] Open the floodgate

Noel Chiappa jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu
Fri Apr 23 06:14:38 PDT 2004


    > From: Michael Welzl <michael.welzl at uibk.ac.at>

    >> we all have known for some time that i) TCP can't currently
    >> distinguish between error loss and congestion loss, and ii) slowing
    >> down for an error loss is a mistake.

    > So why don't we have separate header/payload checksums in TCP yet via a
    > header option, as we now have in DCCP?

The problem is that many routers (and low-level device drivers) simply
discard packets which fail the link-level checksum, so many (most?) of those
error packets will simply never get to the host.

I don't think anyone is philosophically opposed to an option that does what
you suggest, but I'm not sure there would be much interest in it either.

	Noel


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