Re: Net Task Force Drafts TCP Upgrade For Satellite Links

Lloyd Wood (L.Wood@surrey.ac.uk)
Tue, 24 Mar 1998 11:55:02 +0000 (GMT)


On Mon, 23 Mar 1998, Mark Baker wrote:

> Date: Mon, 23 Mar 1998 09:30:16 -0500
> From: Mark Baker <Mark.Baker.mbaker@nt.com>
> To: "'fork@xent.ics.uci.edu'" <fork@xent.ics.uci.edu>
> Subject: Net Task Force Drafts TCP Upgrade For Satellite Links
>
> [ Followups to mark.baker@sympatico.ca please ]
>
> http://www.techweb.com/wire/story/TWB19980322S0002
>
> An interesting story. So, TCPSAT provides both transport and
> network layers, subsuming TCP and IP, but presumably with
> interoperability in mind - at least at the network layer (I hope)

Consensus of the cognoscenti seems to be that the column is complete c^Hjunk.

http://tcpsat.lerc.nasa.gov/tcpsat/

is the place to start for real info; there's been no discussion of TCP
and multicast.

It would appear that the EE times author has conflated the tcp over
satellite efforts and mailing list with whatever else he could bring
to hand; probably got TCPSAT from the URL. Some of the stuff at the
end vaguely relates to what the UDLR group (Walid Dabbous, Emmanuel
Duros, etc) is working on - routing assumptions that would affect
multicast back-propagation during setup of a spanning tree - and
that's the only real might-affect-multicast part, despite the author's
claims.

But hey, don't take _my_ word for it. Below is a response to
tcpoversatellite from Mark Allman, who is actually quoted out of
context in the article.

> What's Teledesic doing about mcast anyhow?

oooh, good question.

http://www.ee.surrey.ac.uk/Personal/L.Wood/publications/index.html#WoodICT98

briefly outlines some of the legacy problems constellations face in
implementing multicast.

L.

what's end2end when it's at home?

<L.Wood@surrey.ac.uk>PGP<http://www.sat-net.com/L.Wood/>+44-1483-300800x3641

Date: Mon, 23 Mar 1998 15:38:11 -0500
From: Mark Allman <mallman@lerc.nasa.gov>
To: Kacheong Poon <kcpoon@jurassic.eng.Sun.COM>
Cc: tcp-over-satellite@achtung.sp.trw.com
Subject: Re: TCPSAT and multicast


> Have you read this article,
> http://www.techweb.com/wire/story/TWB19980322S0002? There are
> some quotes from different researchers. Just wondering if they
> are taken out of context...

The article is absolute junk. If you can't even get Van Jacobson's
name right, you shouldn't be writing about networking. Most (if not
all) of the quotes attributed to me are probably correct but taken
way out of context. I happen to think that multicasting is a
wonderful thing!

As Henning Schulzrinne said on end2end the subtitle of the article
should have been "why not to talk to reporters". I shall heed that
advice from now on.

allman


---
http://gigahertz.lerc.nasa.gov/~mallman/