On the robustness of soft state protocols

J.C.S. Lui, V. Misra, D. Rubenstein
Proceedings of the 12th IEEE International Conference on Network Protocols, 2004. ICNP 2004.  
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 [7, 12] to build such a quantitative argument have found that pure soft state protocols significantly underperform their hard state counterparts, and
more » ... only softhard 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.
doi:10.1109/icnp.2004.1348084 dblp:conf/icnp/LuiMR04 fatcat:naayyh2o2fctlbqlzhx5wh3zpu