RE: Re: iSCSI: SCTP Switch and Router support (FCoverIP)

["Douglas Otis" <dotis@sanlight.net>]

Somesh,

"Problems to overcome implementing a new protocol for routers and switches
that look beyond IP layers should be of the same order of difficulty as the
IP datagram protocol initially proposed for *FCoverIP*. At least the
expensive fragmentation is handled within the SCTP protocol to ensure a
normal router does not see a burden."

The comparison was between the original FCoverIP proposal and SCTP.
Comparing to TCP is a different conversation.

Doug

> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-ips@ece.cmu.edu [mailto:owner-ips@ece.cmu.edu]On Behalf Of
> somesh_gupta@hp.com
> Sent: Thursday, August 24, 2000 10:22 AM
> To: Black_David@emc.com; hufferd@us.ibm.com
> Cc: ips@ece.cmu.edu
> Subject: RE: Re: iSCSI: SCTP Switch and Router support
>
>
> I agree. Look at switches by a lot of vendors (like Alteon,
> Foundry etc.). In general, the trend towards being aware of
> TCP connection flows (keeping actual connection states) is
> increasing with some switches capable of maintaining state
> information for upto a million connections.
>
> In addition to things mentioned by John, it is also going to
> be used (or already being used) for traffic classification
> (VLAN and priority). It is an important component of traffic
> engineering.
>
> (on a comment by Doug, most (all??) TCP implementations today
> avoid fragmentation also (by using path MTU discovery) since
> fragmentation is so expensive for routers or receivers.
>
> Somesh