Rx TCP, general-purpose Rx

Matt Benjamin matt at linuxbox.com
Wed Feb 16 22:24:50 CET 2005


Jeff (or Ken, or maybe Love),

Have some notes been posted about the Rx TCP transport design?  Is there 
some Arla development going on in the same direction, as well (just 
checking, I didn't see anything on arla-drinkers)?

It begins to appear to me, a modernizing Rx would be might more 
attractive as a general-purpose RPC mechanism for new programs than the 
various things I might have used in the past.  Is that a naive view?

Matt

Jeffrey Hutzelman wrote:

>
>
> On Tuesday, February 15, 2005 07:28:03 PM -0600 Troy Benjegerdes 
> <hozer at hozed.org> wrote:
>
>> On Mon, Feb 14, 2005 at 07:33:20PM -0500, Ken Hornstein wrote:
>>
>>> > I was just commenting to a colleague that it would be nice to have
>>> > something like Tim Shepard's TCP packet trace plots for RX.  (See
>>> > xplot.org.)
>>>
>>> I thought of writing something like that, but since my ultimate goal is
>>> to write a TCP transport for RX, I decided that I didn't see much 
>>> point.
>>> But hey, if someone else wants to write one, go for it :-)
>>>
>>
>> What about an SCTP transport for RX?
>>
>> It seems a lot better suited for file transfer, since it's a reliable
>> message-oriented transport, and you can have multiple streams controlled
>> by a single congestion control algorithm.
>>
>> It also seems to have significantly better behavior under heavy
>> packet-loss conditions (see a paper I did for a class at
>> http://www.scl.ameslab.gov/Personnel/Publications/Troy/wireless-sctp/ )
>
>
> I have long believed that SCTP is probably a pretty good match for Rx. 
> However, doing it right will be harder than for TCP, and thus will 
> likely take longer.  The decision we made at the hackathon in December 
> was to work on TCP first, because it was expected it would take less 
> time, and because the people actually doing any work were interested 
> in TCP.  I believe the protocol design we came up with is sound, and I 
> know some folks are working on implementing it.  Of couse, the 
> fileserver will end up with lots of TCP connections, but it will have 
> the option of throwing idle ones away, just as it would for 
> Rx-over-UDP connections.
>
> I would be quite interested in seeing and commenting on an 
> Rx-over-SCTP design, especially if someone is willing to actually do 
> an implementation.
>
> -- Jeffrey T. Hutzelman (N3NHS) <jhutz+ at cmu.edu>
>   Sr. Research Systems Programmer
>   School of Computer Science - Research Computing Facility
>   Carnegie Mellon University - Pittsburgh, PA
>
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Matt Benjamin

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