Re: [Discuss-gnuradio] in-band lib, the original intention of 'tag'

[Eric Blossom]

On Thu, May 01, 2008 at 01:04:26PM -0400, George Nychis wrote:
> What was the original intention of the 'tag' field in the in-band USB 
> packet header?

I think I was thinking of something like an invocation handle.


> As I play more and more the in-band stuff and MAC designs, I'm beginning to 
> realize we are missing one major thing: notification of packet 
> transmission.

Packet transmission, or failure to transmit?

> I think this is a missing piece.  It would be extremely useful to the host 
> if it could determine that its packet was not transmitted.  For example, 
> the packet was sent with an expired timestamp and was thrown away.  The 
> host has no way of knowing the packet was not transmitted.

If you're going to ack all of them, you're going to burn up ~1/2 the
USB bandwidth.

> I'm not sure if this was the original intention of the tag, but it would be 
> extremely useful.  My guess is that the tag was meant to be sort of like 
> the invocation handle.  I think this would be sufficient enough for 
> determining success.
>
> Our queue is big enough for 4 packets (off the top of my head), therefore 
> the tag would only need a history of size 4.  The tag is 4 bits, the bottom 
> 3 bits could be used as a relative packet number, and the top bit notifies 
> success or failure.

> This is an extremely important feature for our MAC enhancements, where we 
> implement time-critical functionality like carrier sense on the board.  
> Aside from timestamps expiring, if our carrier sense decides to throw away 
> a packet, it is important for the host to know.  Therefore, we need some 
> feedback mechanism.  I'm going to implement some feedback mechanism period, 
> I'm just trying to coordinate with the larger framework so it's useful for 
> more than just myself :)

How about just reporting problems?  Would a single bit do it, or do
you need to know which packet/frame had the problem?  IIRC there are
three unused bits in the header.  Perhaps you want to expand tag to 5
bits then use one of the others for an error indicator.

I think you're going to want to piggy back these on any Rx data if you
can, else send them by themselves.

Let us know what you come up with.

Eric