Re: Some thoughts about "path failover"

Jing,

I used, or well, attempted to use, the ARPAnet in the mid-80's before
the deployment of end-system congestion control in TCP.

I don't want to go back.

Since then, responsibility for congestion control has lived primarily
in end systems.  What you are proposing ("just send however much you
feel like") is a step in the wrong direction.  

While there may be situations where you can ignore congestion control
best practices and get excellent benchmark results under carefully
controlled conditions, such environments tend to be unstable under
load and are therefore unsuitable for production use.

Path failover is likely to be triggered in as the result of packet
loss.  Packet loss is often caused by congestion.  Sending a burst of
packets when you detect an event which may be the result of congestion
has been considered a really bad idea for about two decades now.

We MUST NOT produce a spec which, if deployed, would force router
vendors to produce countermeasures to protect the rest of the network
from us.

						- Bill