[11891] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: Asymetrical Routing
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Vern Paxson)
Thu Aug 21 20:10:30 1997
To: Jayme Cox <jcox@broder.com>
Cc: nanog@merit.edu
In-reply-to: Your message of Thu, 21 Aug 1997 16:47:54 PDT.
Date: Thu, 21 Aug 1997 17:02:41 PDT
From: Vern Paxson <vern@ee.lbl.gov>
> My question is: How bad is this? Is it terminaly bad or simply not
> so great?
Asymmetric routing by itself has virtually no impact on performance. It does
present a measurement headache, though. This is discussed in a paper of mine
available from
ftp://ftp.ee.lbl.gov/papers/routing.SIGCOMM.ps.Z
a revised version of which will be appearing in IEEE/ACM TON later this year.
> Out of order TCP packets are bad, but can simply be reassembled.
Asymmetry doesn't lead to out-of-order delivery, so this isn't a problem.
Routes that *change* often, on the other hand, can indeed lead to performance
problems.
Vern
