New Router Manages Flows, Not Packets 122
An anonymous reader writes "A new router, designed by one of the creators of ARPANET, manages flows of packets instead of only managing individual packets. The router recognizes packets that are following the first and sends them along faster than if it had to route them as individuals. When overloaded, the router can make better choices of which packets to drop. 'Indeed, during most of my career as a network engineer, I never guessed that the queuing and discarding of packets in routers would create serious problems. More recently, though, as my Anagran colleagues and I scrutinized routers during peak workloads, we spotted two serious problems. First, routers discard packets somewhat randomly, causing some transmissions to stall. Second, the packets that are queued because of momentary overloads experience substantial and nonuniform delays, significantly reducing throughput (TCP throughput is inversely proportional to delay). These two effects hinder traffic for all applications, and some transmissions can take 10 times as long as others to complete.'"
Well duh (Score:5, Funny)
Damn right, they manage flows. It keeps the tubes from clogging.
Duuuurrrrrr.
so... (Score:2, Funny)
a router tampon?
Pretty girls make things go faster (Score:1, Funny)
Why can't we just put a pretty girl on top of it and make the packets go faster.
Seems to work with car advertising and on animals.
Re:Well duh (Score:3, Funny)
I don't know if I trust this guy with my interweb tubes, though. Did you notice the mess of cables [ieee.org] behind him?
If we can't trust him to keep his wiring closet organized, how can we trust him to clean the tubes?
No big thang (Score:1, Funny)
this sounds fancy, but the only real improvement is hash-table lookup, everything is already implemented with current generation routers.
and it starts at $30000 a model, ROFLMAO. Thanks, umm , but NO thanks!
It looks like horrible technolgy (Score:2, Funny)
Among the innovations:
no ram for buffering flows to cope with any temporary overcommitments. Instead it does this:
"Even more significant, the FR-1000 does away entirely with the queuing chips. During congestion, it adjusts each flow rate at its input instead. If an incoming flow has a rate deemed too high, the equipment discards a single packet to signal the transmission to slow down."
Um, discarding a random packet in the middle of my session will indeed slow the flow down, much in the same way as if you shoot me in the knee it will slow me down.
Re:Pretty girls make things go faster (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Net neutrality anyone? (Score:5, Funny)
QoS isn't a bad thing, but the user should be in control of it
Exactly! That way MY packets (not some of them, ALL OF THEM) need to be prioritized.
Kind of reminds me of the good old days when I had access to print queue priorities. No-one ever understood why my printouts always came out first...I maintained I was just lucky.