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Published Articles >> Table of Contents >> Abstract
12th IEEE International Conference on Network Protocols (ICNP'04)
pp. 50-60
On the Robustness of Soft State Protocols
John C. S. Lui, The Chinese University of Hong Kong
Vishal Misra, Columbia University, New York, NY
Dan Rubenstein, Columbia University, New York, NY
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DOI Bookmark: http://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/ICNP.2004.1348084
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Soft state has been a mantra of Internet protocol design for the past decade. System designers build protocols that implement soft state mechanisms based on intuition or on qualitative arguments that the design is "better", yet there has never been a formal performance evaluation study that draws the same conclusion. In fact, previous attempts to build such a quantitative argument have found that pure soft state protocols significantly under-perform their hard state counterparts, and that only soft-hard hybrids can match hard state protocol performance. In this paper, we argue otherwise. We develop models that provide a performance-oriented explanation and justification of the Internet designer's intuition. The novel observation is that, if network conditions are known, a hard state protocol can always be configured to outperform its soft state counterpart. However, in reality, network conditions are unpredictable, and that soft state protocols are much more resilient to unanticipated fluctuations in these conditions.
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 Additional Information
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Index Terms- methodology of designing network protocols, stochastic analysis, robustness
Citation:
John C. S. Lui, Vishal Misra, Dan Rubenstein,
"On the Robustness of Soft State Protocols,"
icnp,
pp. 50-60,
12th IEEE International Conference on Network Protocols (ICNP'04),
2004
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