Why has this not been done?

[Stephen R Laniel]

On Tue, Jul 19, 2005 at 09:39:20AM -0400, dave walker wrote:
> months and can not figure out why it has not yet been done.  I know 
> there is randomness in the initial sequence number for TCP packets.  But 
> what about making the rest of the packets random sequence.  (read my 
> post before saying you can't have random sequence numbers)

Do you know about the sliding-window protocol? That's how
TCP handles flow control (i.e., making sure that a fast
sender doesn't overwhelm a slow receiver). The packets have
to be in a continuous sequence so that I can tell you which
ones I've processed and which ones I'm willing to receive.
All I have to send you are two numbers: the high end of the
window and the low end. With random sequence numbers, I'd
have to send a very long list of numbers of packets that I'm
willing to accept.

There have been proposals for discontinuous sliding windows,
but I'm not sure they've gone anywhere. I'll dig around for
the RFCs.

I'm no TCP expert, but that's my understanding of the
architecture problem.

-- 
Stephen R. Laniel
steve at laniels.org
+(617) 308-5571
http://laniels.org/
PGP key: http://laniels.org/slaniel.key
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