RE: An alternative to TCP (part 1)

[aaron]

> 1. There are two annoying incompetence of TCP. One is that 
> TCP does not distinguish packet loss caused by network 
> transmission error from that caused by network congestion. 
> The congestion control and avoidance mechanism makes TCP 
> drop its transmit window upon detecting a packet loss, 
> thus lowers the transmit rate even if the loss is caused 
> by physical link transmit error.
>    This results in an unnecessary reduction in link 
> bandwidth utilization, especially in the environment of 
> wireless physical links.

The Performance Implications of Link Characteristics (PILC) working group
has been exploring this.
(http://www.ietf.org/html.charters/pilc-charter.html) See
draft-ietf-pilc-error-06.txt and draft-ietf-pilc-link-design-04.txt for a
discussion of ways to ameliorate performance issues that don't require an
alternative to TCP. Bottom line recommendation: implement forward error
correction to improve noisy links, don't require the world to adopt a new
TCP.