ARPANET Co-Founder Calls for Flow Management

An anonymous reader writes "Lawrence Roberts, co-founder of ARPANET and inventor of packet switching, today published an article in which he claims to solve the congestion control problem on the Internet. Roberts says, contrary to popular belief, the problem with congestion is the networks, not Transmission Control Protocol (TCP). Rather than overhaul TCP, he says, we need to deploy flow management, and selectively discard no more than one packet per TCP cycle. Flow management is the only alternative to peering into everyone's network, he says, and it's the only way to fairly distribute Internet capacity."

Hmmm

[Anonymous Coward]

Why didn't he think of that 40 years ago?

Flow control???

[3-State Bit]

So now we actually DO need to make the Internet more like a series of tubes??? brain asplode

Solutions for flow management...

[Ellis D. Tripp]

http://www.tampax.com/ [tampax.com]
http://www.kotex.com/ [kotex.com]

Re:Weird solution

[Bill Dog]

However, the only real way to fix congestion is to grow capacity, which seems to have worked thus far.

To use an obligatory car analogy, think of congestion on the roadways. What you're talking about is widening the highways. But that just encourages more packets to be placed onto the network. We need to stop letting people use the Internet for what they want, when they want (freedom is bad). What we really need is the equivalent of, you guessed it, public transportation. Here's how it would work: As we all know your data is broken up and encapsulated into packets. Your packets would arrive at your edge router, where the data would disembark and then sit around and wait for the equivalent of the TCP/IP bus. This mega-packet that carries multiple ordinary packets worth of data around would then stop at each hop on its fixed route. Your data would have to check the fucking mega-packet schedule to see where to get off and then wait for another mega-packet to come along for the next leg of its journey.

Re:RMS on the same subject.

[Culture20]

when did stallman become an expert on everything?

Your question implies that he - at some point - was not.

Re:RMS on the same subject.

[TooMuchToDo]

Kind of like saying, "When did Chuck Norris become a bad ass." He's always been a bad ass, just like the universe has always existed.

Re:Weird solution

[swillden]

I get it, anyone has the right to board the bus, so it's fair.

Sure, anyone can get on, but YOUR packets have to ride in back.

Re:Why not now?

[ghjm]

Yes, you are precisely right. As things stand now, there's no good reason why tier one networks need to buy vast amounts of new routing infrastructure - what they already own works just fine. With this new plan, they will all have to buy ten times more hardware, which will return us all to the glory days of the dot com era. Or at least will return Lawrence Roberts to the glory days of the dot com era.

Why, did you think this plan had something to do with providing better service to end-users? When does that ever happen?

-Graham

Re:RMS on the same subject.

[thrillseeker]

The universe exists because Chuck Norris allows it to exist ...