Re: [TERNLI] Notes from tonight's ad hoc

[Michael Welzl <[e-mail]>]

> > 802.16 also has adaptive modulation and coding that alter the rate of
> > the channel and may vary as the distance between a base station and
> > subscriber station changes.  Adaptive coding is common for satellite
> > links as well.  It seems like this type of event could be useful to
> > signal if it resulted in more than a doubling or halving of capacity, as
> > a simple filter.
>
> One way to look at this is that the "type of event" is not at all
> important to communicate.  The real thing to get across is the available
> capacity has changed somewhat dramatically.  Does it really matter if
> this is because 802.11 dropped us from 11mbps to 2mbps or some BoD
> system just allocated us a ton of capacity or we moved much closer to
> some access point / basestation and now have a much better signal?
>
> Does this make sense?

A lot!

I was about to say something similar in case the discussion
would have moved further in this direction (signaling irrelevant
details about link layer occurrences to the transport layer).
I think that any comunication from lower layers up to the
transport layer should be converted to a transport-layer-related
format (where we're interested in things such as the RTT,
capacity (even though this is usually not available at the
transport layer - but it's an upper limit, so why not
communicate it?), all kinds of traffic related information
(e.g. imminent sudden growth), ...).

I don't want to turn this into an acedemic exercise - all
I'm suggesting is to think in such terms when looking at
link layer events that should somehow be communicated to
the endpoints.

Cheers,
Michael