Re: ECN: Clearing the air (fwd)

Jamie Lokier
2001-01-29T00:16:08Z

Gregory Maxwell wrote:
> > > There is nothing silly with the decision, davem is simply a modern day
> > > internet hero.
> >
> > No. If it were something essential, perhaps, but it's just a minor
> > performance tweak to cut packet loss over congested links. It's not
> > IPv6. It's not PMTU. It's not even very useful right now!
>
> No. ECN is essential to the continued stability of the Internet. Without
> probabilistic queuing (i.e. RED) and ECN the Internet will continue to have
> retransmit synchronization and once congested stay congested until people get
> frustrated and give it up for a little bit.

There are other forms of probabilistic queuing, and RED+ECN may not be
one of the ones which scales as the net gets larger.... We're keen on
latency, burst avoidance and other quality guarantees these days. ECN
is an improvement of just RED alone of course.

-- Jamie