[e2e] Question the other way round:

[Fred Baker (fred)]

On Nov 20, 2013, at 3:58 PM, Richard Bennett <richard at bennett.com>
 wrote:

> Before the IP hegemony took hold, corporate and other private networks used to deal with congested interior links by sending low priority traffic over less optimal paths that had some excess capacity rather than by dropping packets. We called this system "dynamic load balancing". I don't think it's ever been popular with the Internet crowd.

I wouldn't bet on that. In this community it's often called the "fish problem", in the sense that there may be multiple paths from A to B, and the reasons that traffic takes one path or another are matters of policy. Look through the RFC series for specifications for Multi-Topology Routing. It's also done using MPLS in service provider networks - all the traffic from a given AS to some other AS uses a given LSP, and the LSP is routed in accordance with the contracts with those ISPs.

> On 11/20/2013 3:04 PM, Ted Faber wrote:
>> On 11/20/2013 14:50, Ivancic, William D. (GRC-RHN0) wrote:
>>>> It's the same old thing.  Pre-book your resources and underuse them or
>>>> overbook and deal with contention.
>>> The Airlines overbook all the time.  Hopefully I am not the one dealing
>>> with the contention.  Usually someone else is willing to get paid off -
>>> their time value is apparently less then mine.  So here is an economics
>>> example.
>> Exactly so.  It can be illuminating to apply networking solutions to
>> those kinds of resources.  If the airlines used leaky buckets to decide
>> which flyers to bump, bursty flyers would be discriminated against.
>> 
>> Thinking about airlines is nice in that it does give the flavor of some
>> network congestion issues.  For example, an airline might choose to
>> offer people with more connections more money to drop out of the system
>> early in the hopes of reducing overall contention.  I'm sure you can
>> think of more.
>> 
>> The Internet is more interesting in that there are many more legs and
>> passengers and much less information at a given airport about where the
>> passengers are going.  And that's just drop policy, which is a corner of
>> the congestion control problem.
>> 
> 
> -- 
> Richard Bennett
> Visiting Fellow, American Enterprise Institute
> Center for Internet, Communications, and Technology Policy
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	• Make things as simple as possible, but not simpler.
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