> As wifi has evolved all sorts of packets below the conventional link > layer that are invisible to IP (management frames in general), perhaps > finding saner ways of exposing these packet types and their properties > to the conventional IP stack - and the IP stack to the properties of > the wifi frames - would be of help.
I think it might be useful to think why TCP/IP has eaten all the other protocol suites for lunch. TCP/IP is a horribly inefficient protocol suite. Any on of us could design something simpler, more elegant, and more efficient. TCP/IP wastes precious bits in multiple headers, and wastes opportunities for optimisation by avoiding to a great extent cross-layer optimisations. So why did TCP/IP succeed? Because it is layered. The price you pay for layering is the inefficiency, but it is well worth it -- because it is lower-layer agnostic, TCP/IP was able to adapt to new physical layers faster than all the other protocols. If you're not convinced, please try running DECNET natively over ATM (encapsulating Ethernet frames within AAL3/4 PVCs doesn't count). I don't think it's productive to get the network layer know to much about the details of the physical layer -- all your work will need to be redone in five years, when the next iteration of .11 breaks your assumptions. The link layer is where the phy-related smarts belong. (Now babeld has some knowledge of lower-layer characteristics, and this causes no end of trouble. But it's not too bad, since it's just the implementation -- no lower-layer assumptions reside in the protocol beyond those made by IP.) -- Juliusz _______________________________________________ Cerowrt-devel mailing list [email protected] https://lists.bufferbloat.net/listinfo/cerowrt-devel
