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The secret of congestion: Why does network traffic cause packet loss?
With the advent of the digital age, the frequency of Internet usage has increased, leading to a rapid growth in data traffic.Under this situation, the problem of packet loss has attracted more and more attention.Packet loss refers to the failure of some packets to reach the destination during transmission. This phenomenon not only affects the user's experience, but also has an impact on the overall efficiency of the network.
The loss of packets will affect the user's experience in real-time applications such as streaming media playback and online games.
What is the reason for the loss of packets?The core of this problem lies in the operating principles of the network.Internet Protocol (IP) adopts a terminal-to-terminal principle, aiming to provide an optimal effort to keep the router's implementation process simple.If the network must ensure reliable transmission on its own, each router will need to take up a lot of additional storage space to ensure that each node receives the packet correctly.
In addition, in some cases, such as the transmission of instant cultural content, it is more important to quickly transmit recent packets than to wait for outdated packets for a long time.This makes many routers choose to ignore the transmission of data packets in high-traffic network environments, resulting in the occurrence of loss.
The phenomenon of packet loss is like sending an implicit signal to the sender, telling them that the network is in poor condition and suggesting that they reduce bandwidth usage.
Factors affecting packet loss
The loss of packets will be affected by a variety of factors, the most significant of which is network congestion.When a router or network section continuously receives information beyond its processing capacity, it will inevitably lead to some packets being discarded.This phenomenon is especially known as a bottleneck in some special circumstances, and will be more obvious.
The environment of wireless networks is even more variable. For example, wireless signal interference, signal attenuation caused by too long distances and hardware failures will all lead to the missing data packets.Even in a theoretically optimized network environment, the results of wireless transmission are often difficult to meet the ideal standards.
"TCP is designed so that transmission rates often fail to reach their theoretical value on wireless networks."
The impact of packet loss
The loss of packets directly leads to a reduction in network transmission efficiency.For example, under some protocols, when packets are lost, the sender will automatically reduce the transmission rate to avoid further bottlenecks.Sometimes these missing packets need to be resented to resend, which can cause delay and consume additional bandwidth.
It is worth noting that the acceptable packet loss rate varies depending on the type of data.For example, in VoIP calls, losing one or two packets per minute has limited impact on call quality, but if the loss climbs to 5% to 10%, it will significantly affect call quality.
"For the transmission of audio or video streams, packet loss is usually considered good."
How to detect and diagnose packet loss
To effectively manage the loss of data packets, network managers often rely on various tools and protocols.Among them, the Internet Control Information Protocol (ICMP) provides a reply mechanism to detect loss conditions by sending special data packets.Tools such as ping, traceroute, etc. use this technology to visualize the path and measure the loss rate of each jump point.
In addition, many routers are also equipped with status pages or logs for owners to view the loss rate over a certain period of time.Through these effective management methods, network administrators can timely grasp the network conditions and make corresponding adjustments.
Retransmission mechanism and reliable transmission strategy
According to the end-to-end principle of the Internet, the responsibility for data retransmission lies in the sending and receiving ends of the data.This means that the application needs to decide whether to retransmit the lost packet.Reliable transmission protocols such as TCP provide a simple mechanism to ensure reliable transmission of data, so that whenever the transmission fails, the receiver can request retransmission of unconfirmed segments.
However, even if TCP performs well on retransmitting lost packets, this process will reduce the total throughput of the connection, as the receiver needs to wait for retransmission.Unlike TCP, the connectionless UDP protocol will not automatically resend lost packets, and users need to deal with the loss by themselves.
Conclusion
The loss of packets is a major challenge in network traffic management, and it has a significant impact on user experience and network operation efficiency.However, through reasonable network strategies and technical means, we may be able to effectively reduce the loss of packets.Do you think, how should we further improve the problem of packet loss in the future development of network technology?
