Abstract
It is proved that any protocol that constructs a reliable data link service using an unreliable physical channel service necessarily includes in the packets some header information that enables the protocol to treat different packets differently. The physical channel considered is permitted to lose, but not reorder or duplicate packets. The formal framework used for the proof is the I/O automaton model.
The authors were supported in part by the National Science Foundation under grant CCR-86-11442, by the Office of Naval Research under contract N00014-85-K-0168 and by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency under contracts N00014-83-K-0125 and N00014-89-J-1988. The first author was supported in part by the Research Foundation for Information Technology of the University of Sydney.
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Fekete, A., Lynch, N. (1990). The need for headers: An impossibility result for communication over unreliable channels. In: Baeten, J.C.M., Klop, J.W. (eds) CONCUR '90 Theories of Concurrency: Unification and Extension. CONCUR 1990. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 458. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/BFb0039061
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BFb0039061
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