[e2e] What's wrong with this picture?

[Detlef Bosau]

Ken Calvert wrote:
>
>> Did I get you right: MSL = Maximum Segment Length?
>
> Sorry - Maximum Segment Lifetime.

As ist was said before... sorry....

However, the story remains the same. What is the reason to keep a 
segment in the network that long?

Is it a wireless link between the earth and the moon, where it takes 
some time for a packet to travel the whole distance?
Or is it a recovery layer who does endless retransmissions on link layer?

Now, when a packet gets dropped/corrupted on the way, the packet needs 
retransmission. There's no discussion about that. The question is, 
whether the retransmission is to be done locally or end-to-end.

Perhaps, this does not make really a difference for a _single_ TCP 
connection on a _dedicated_ path / link.

However, for mobile terminals in a cellular network, it make a huge 
difference whether a base station deals quite some minutes with one 
packet (as we see this in GPRS) and several terminals are not even 
serviced, or whether the effort on L2 remains in reasonable limits.






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