Re: Wireless Application Protocol

From: Matti Aarnio (wxbbe.lqctysi@ecb-gmbh.de)
Date: Wed Apr 05 2000 - 10:31:41 EEST

  • Next message: Shawn T. Rutledge: "AXIP and NetRom"

    On Tue, Apr 04, 2000 at 01:49:35PM -0700, Doug Royer wrote:
    > > Date: Sun, 2 Apr 2000 15:53:16 -0700
    > > From: "Shawn T. Rutledge" <qfwig.sfzajlez@covenant.edu>
    >
    > > Anyway... yes it does seem like many Internet protocols are not optimized
    > > for packet operation. SMTP is a really good example; the sender expects
    > > to carry on a verbose, real-time conversation directly with the recipient,
    > > regardless how many hops are between, where a store-and-forward scheme
    > > makes more sense on just about any network, not just the most unreliable
    > > ones. ...
    >
    > See draft-freed-smtp-pipe-01.txt
    > Available from
    > ftp://ftp.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-freed-smtp-pipe-01.txt

            Oh, Ned is revising/refining PIPELINE specification, I see...

    Network Working Group Ned Freed
    Internet Draft Innosoft
    Obsoletes: 2197, 1854 <draft-freed-smtp-pipe-01.txt>

            However this does *not* make anything to alleviate the end-to-end
            connectivity expectations of classical unaugmented MX routing rules.

            What this does give (and I am happy to say it is most effective),
            is to reduce the number of round-trip times needed for getting
            the address handshake over slowish (long delay) link.

            On average the email contains perhaps 1-2 recipients, but the
            basic half-duplex operation means there is the half-duplex
            delay for each of:
                    HELO xxx
                    MAIL FROM...
                    RCPT TO..
                    DATA
                    .
            With PIPELINE enabled, there are sync-points at:
                    EHLO ...
                    (mail from, rcpt to's - NO SYNC HERE!)
                    DATA
                     .
            Ok, for one recipient message this means saving 2 round-trips,
            but in cases like large mailinglist feeds (as vger.rutgers.edu
            does), messages have on average 120 recipients.
            (Yes, it is higher than the '100' which SMTP specification
             says as the maximum, but ZMailers have their private extension
             for that too..)

            Presume each round-trip ack takes 0.6 seconds, have 100 recipients,
            how much time will it need to feed the recipients without pipeline ?
            Yes, one minute.. With PIPELINE, it takes 3 seconds to feed entire
            message with 60 kB body. (Those were actual figures from way back
            when I did implement that feature to ZMailer after VGER's feeds
            were lagging behind queue accumulation for this reason alone.)

            Re-iterating on what the issue is about email in store-and-forward
            networks.

            Those need STATIC ROUTING LISTINGS, e.g. in the era of UUCP there
            used to be mapping entries by which routings were then calculated
            for spanning the entire network based on what connections each
            node had.

            Similarly in BITNET (which was pure store-and-forward, although
            semi realtime with permanently active connections) once in a month
            updated connectivity datasets were sent to each node, which then
            ran some program to calculate which destination node is addressable
            by which nexthop link. Program's output was simply a listing of
                    destination-node nexthop-node
            for all known nodes in the network.

            Nothing prevents similar in the current era of domain names, e.g.
            for all AMPRnet nodes; in the internet DNS list MXes of:

                    node.ampr.net. IN MX 10 nearest.gw.
                                    IN MX 20 backup.gw.

            and then having spanned areas served by those gws to carry out
            with static routings:

                    node.ampr.net. smtpax25!nexthop1!nexthop2!node.ampr.net

            (This is ZMailer style routing entry, which can handle as well
             subdomains, as individual domains. Data is 'channel'!'routedata'
             Similar things can, no doubt, be done with other systems too.
             Check for 'pathalias' mechanisms, for example.)

            Yes, IP universe protocols are *not* good for every possible use.
            So, pick some other protocol to do your work, even if it RESEMBLES
            some of IP universe protocols.

    > -Doug
    > -------------------------------------------------------------------
    > Doug@Royer@.COM http://Royer.com/People/Doug.html
    > 801 W. El Camino #131 Work: (650)786-7599
    > Mountain View, CA 94040 Ham Radio: N6AAW, Aviation: PP-ASEL

    /Matti Aarnio <ujtiqfpt@mx.dy.fi> OH2MQK



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