AW: [e2e] Congestion control is not mandatory?

Michael Welzl michael.welzl at uibk.ac.at
Tue Sep 14 15:02:42 PDT 2004


> > This is curious ... it just occured to me that RFC 2581 is
> > just a Proposed Standard.
> > 
> > That means that I can build a fully conformant TCP/IP
> > which does not do congestion control, doesn't it?
> 
> RFC 1122 says (on page 89):
> 
> 	Recent work by Jacobson [TCP:7] on Internet congestion and TCP
> 	retransmission stability has produced a transmission algorithm
> 	combining "slow start" with "congestion avoidance".  A TCP MUST
> 	implement this algorithm.
> 
> 
> So that's a "no."  Or maybe a MUST NOT.

Ok, so you answered my question. Still, there are the somewhat
weird facts that i) here's a standard RFC referencing a paper
(not an RFC) with MUST implement while there's an RFC that
specifies what's needed, and ii) RFC 2581 is a Proposed Standard.

Heck, if that is not a Standard, what is? Do we need more
implementations?  :-)

Cheers,
Michael



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