RFC-38
by Darius Kazemi, Feb 7 2019
In 2019 I'm reading one RFC a day in chronological order starting from the very first one. More on this project here. There is a table of contents for all my RFC posts.
Multiplexing
RFC-38 is authored by Stephen M. Wolfe of UCLA, and is a reply to RFC-36.
The technical content
Wolfe proposes that it might make sense to allow multiple connections to share the same physical link, especially if a single computer requires multiple connections to get some work done. That way a whole bunch of physical connections won't be hogged by one computer. He also says that it might be useful in another high-traffic situation where an entire new internal network (multiple HOSTs with multiple users) connects to ARPANET and needs to connect out to the rest of the network.
He then proposes some minor additions to the new network protocol that wouldn't allow multiple shared connections in and of themselves, but would make it possible in the future. He also asks a question about whether certain situations require referencing the physical link or the software connection.
How to follow this blog
You can subscribe to this blog's RSS feed or if you're on a federated ActivityPub social network like Mastodon or Pleroma you can search for the user “@365-rfcs@write.as” and follow it there.
About me
I'm Darius Kazemi. I'm a Mozilla Fellow and I do a lot of work on the decentralized web with both ActivityPub and the Dat Project.