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Abstract : |
This is work done under the guidance of Deborah Estrin, Sally Floyd and Van Jacobson. The primary goal of a data network is to carry data traffic. Some of the traffic carried in a network is control traffic such as routing, signalling and end-to-end protocol control. Unregulated growth of control traffic can jeopardize the primary goal of networks. This paper discusses scaling of control traffic in network protocols and proposes some general scaling techniques. Control traffic can be regulated along three scaling dimensions: (1) frequency, (2) distribution scope, and (3) information aggregation. This paper describes a study of scalable timers to regulate control traffic along frequency dimension. We also describe future work in the areas of distribution scope and information aggregation. Soft state protocols use periodic refresh messages to keep network state alive while adapting to changing network conditions; this has raised concerns regarding the scalability of protocols that use the soft-state approach. In existing soft state protocols, the values of the timers that control the sending of these messages, and the timers for aging out state, are chosen by matching empirical observations with desired recovery and response times. These fixed timer-values fail because they use time as a metric for bandwidth; they adapt neither to (1) the wide range of link speeds that exist in most, |
