<div dir="ltr">if by catenet you mean the specific deployed technologies of the arpanet, milnet, arpa packet radio, satnet, and IPSS, then the answer is<div>a) no, it didn't specifiy lin layer flow control</div><div>but</div>
<div>b) yes, sone of the links had flow control</div><div style>but</div><div style>i) its sometimes a bad idea - due to poor interactions between nested control loops</div><div style>but </div><div style>ii) occasionally, it helps, but you have to get quite lucky...</div>
<div style><br></div><div>for example, IP over X.25 (treating x.25' layer 3 packet protocol as a link layer in true cavalier fdashion, as one does), causes weird things to happen to TCP's end2end behaviour due to the sudden step functions in measured RTT up and down as the link layer does odd stuff - thi hurt badly in the UK academic early IP deployments which had to run this way..</div>
<div><br></div><div>on the other hand, there was nice work at bell labs (debasis mitra et al) that showed you could get optimal traffic distribution in a homogenous enough network by using link layer flow control to sprad out traffic load....but it does NOT work in a catenet (or internet) when all the links are very heterogeneous....youre better off doing multipath and e2e flow (and congrestion control) - of course, we don't have much catenet/internet layer multipath yet, which is a shame as it was in the origianl thinking and has re-emerged recently with lots of nice results that show it would benefit in may places (edge, core, and data center nets) - for references on multipath, see </div>
<div><a href="http://nrg.cs.ucl.ac.uk/mptcp/">http://nrg.cs.ucl.ac.uk/mptcp/</a><br></div><div><br></div><div style>but maybe I am just treading on the toes of giants again....</div><div style>bald and grey</div><div style>
<br></div><div style>j.</div></div><div class="gmail_extra"><br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Fri, May 24, 2013 at 4:34 PM, Detlef Bosau <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:detlef.bosau@web.de" target="_blank">detlef.bosau@web.de</a>></span> wrote:<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">O.k., perhaps this is for all readers with grey hair (if there is still hair at all....) and grey beards ;-)<br>
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When I read the original catenet work by Cerf, the Catenet employed link layer flow control.<br>
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To my understanding, this was abandoned when the ARPAnet turned into the Internet (in 1981?). After this change, the link layer flow control was replaced by a "silent discard" of packets which cannot be accepted for delivery.<br>
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Is this correct?<br>
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What was the reason for this decision and have there been any alternative approaches?<span class="HOEnZb"><font color="#888888"><br>
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