[Bloat] The wireless problem in a nutshell

[Juliusz Chroboczek]

> what you are also doing is dividing the TCP streams into two pieces -
> the wireless piece is VERY short - and congestion control then works
> correctly using existing techniques on the wired and unwired portions
> of the connection.

You've reinvented a useful technique, called "split-TCP".  It's commonly
used by the "WAN accelerators" that you can buy in order to get Microsoft
protocols working across the Internet.

The downside of split-TCP, of course, is that it breaks e2e, and hence
fate sharing, i.e. it introduces a new point of failure and makes your
network more brittle.  The challenge is to make TCP efficient without
the need for split-TCP, which requires differentiating between
congestion-induced loss and wireless loss.

--Juliusz