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From: Mills@UDEL.EDU
Newsgroups: comp.protocols.tcp-ip
Subject: Re:  ISO8473 vs. IP
Message-ID: <8709092329.aa23398@Huey.UDEL.EDU>
Date: Wed, 9-Sep-87 23:29:25 EDT
Article-I.D.: Huey.8709092329.aa23398
Posted: Wed Sep  9 23:29:25 1987
Date-Received: Sat, 12-Sep-87 06:14:41 EDT
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Marty,

I'm not sure a headlong leap on the DEC bit would be appropriate for
the existing IP gateway munchkins, but something like this has been
proposed to indicate "congestion experienced." The particular
method used to determine when gateway has too much kin to munch may
depend on the gateway queueing discipline, preemption policy and
whether the interfaces are blocking or not, etc. If I understand
the DEC bit, the bit is set on a packet that arrives for a queue
with at least one packet already queued. Now, from queueing theory,
we can compute for each level of traffic the probability that the
queue has n customers for each n. A clever end system can then work
this backwards to estimate (crudely!) the level of traffic when the
bit is set. It's a nice idea and should be tried in an experiment.
However, there are lots of other ideas that should be tried, too.

Dave