[e2e] TCP Framing

[Ramesh Shankar]

The fairness issue is an interesting angle and seems relevant only when 
bandwidth is really limited or from an ISP perspective (perhaps). This 
angle is similar to the "fair share scheduling" approach used in time 
sharing UNIX systems. This issue has been discussed in the following 
Ph.D. thesis:

V. N. Padmanabhan
Ph.D. Dissertation
Computer Science Division, University of California at Berkeley, USA
September 1998
(Also published as Technical Report UCB/CSD-98-1016.)

http://www.research.microsoft.com/~padmanab/phd-thesis.html

I am not a researcher to be able to make authoritative statements, but I 
felt that just like the FSS concept is no longer relevant in todays 
systems, the fairness issue is perhaps not so relevant. I have been 
curious to understand this issue and perhaps someone can throw some 
light on this.

Thanks,

S.R.

Damon Wischik wrote:

> Phillip Conrad wrote:
> 
>> David P. Reed wrote:
>> 
>>> Why not use multiple TCP connections
>> 
>> Two reasons: (1) fairness (2) slow start/congestion avoidance.
>> Fairness: If I use "n" TCP connections for a single flow because I have
>> three logical streams that I want to be processed out-of-order with
>> respect to one another, then I am getting "n" times greater a share of
>> the bandwidth on congested links that I should reasonably be entitled
>> to. 
> 
> 
> This begs the question: what are you reasonably entitled to?
> 
> If you have three logically separate streams which can be processed
> out-of-order, I would have thought there is a case to be made that those
> are three essentially independent streams (which just happen to be between
> the same end-nodes), and so together they deserve three times the
> bandwidth of a single stream. 
> 
> Damon Wischik.