Asymetrical Routing

Fri Aug 22 00:02:41 UTC 1997

> 	My question is: How bad is this? Is it terminaly bad or simply not
> so great?

Asymmetric routing by itself has virtually no impact on performance.  It does
present a measurement headache, though.  This is discussed in a paper of mine
available from

	ftp://ftp.ee.lbl.gov/papers/routing.SIGCOMM.ps.Z

a revised version of which will be appearing in IEEE/ACM TON later this year.

> Out of order TCP packets are bad, but can simply be reassembled.

Asymmetry doesn't lead to out-of-order delivery, so this isn't a problem.
Routes that *change* often, on the other hand, can indeed lead to performance
problems.

		Vern