Receive Livelock

Read: Eliminating Livelock paper

Hand-In Procedure

You are to turn in this homework during lecture. Please write up your answers to the exercises below and hand them in to a 6.828 staff member at the beginning of lecture.

Receiver Livelock

The questions in this homework are related to the key phenomenon discussed in the paper. After reading the paper, answer the following, briefly. All the questions below refer to the graph for the unmodified kernel (without screend) in figure 6-1.

Submit:

  1. Why does the output packet rate for the unmodified kernel (without screend) initially go up as the input rate rises?
  2. After a certain point, why does the output packet rate fall as the input rate rises?
  3. What determines how high the peak is?
  4. Beyond the peak, what determines how fast the output rate falls?