[e2e] Is a non-TCP solution dead?

[Spencer Dawkins]

Just a minor clarification to Michael's summary, and a thought:

--- Michael Welzl <michael.welzl at uibk.ac.at> wrote:
> Dear Alex,
> 
[deleted down to]
> 
> Use mechanisms like source quench -> usually doesn't scale
> maybe explicit corruption notification ... well, this is being
> discussed occasionally ... see the trigtran effort, for
> instance -

In my active fantasy life, I dream that explicit corruption
notification is ready for engineering, but the TRIGTRAN charter
we submitted to Allison is a lot more constrained than this.

On the other hand, if we thought explicit corruption
notification was closer to engineering, we'd be thrilled.

> 
> Quite a statement. Which general-purpose solution do you
> propose?

My suggestion is a Stephen Covey "Begin with the end in mind" -
I'm not sure we have a well-defined general-purpose problem
statement. If I grokked the chat so far, I'm hearing some people
working on this problem:

"Can we build a transport protocol that outperforms TCP in some
environments?" (implicit answer = "almost certainly"), 

while others are working on this problem:

"Can we improve TCP's performance in all environments?"
(implicit answer="maybe a little").

I'm not saying this is the only reason for a discussion
disconnect, but it would be enough of a reason by itself.

Spencer