| I thought the 5th tuple of 5-tuple is usually the L4 protocol (TCP, UDP, | ICMP, etc.). If your algorithm also takes DS values into account, you'd | have a 6-tuple. It's possible to take into account TCP/UDP/whatnot but breaking fate-sharing based on something that is not inherently a hint to the routers of the Internet seems rather strange, especially considering that you can end up in weird situations where ICMP works and TCP doesn't, or vice-versa, making things very hard to diagnose. If a 5-tuple is being used, TOS/diffserv makes much more sense, because the settor of that byte is explicitly signalling to the routing system that packets are to be treated differently from others with different values in the same byte. There is also the fact that splitting traffic across multiple paths based on passenger transport protocol is unlikely to produce much of a win anyway; the bulk of traffic by packets and by bytes is associated with the other 4 elements is very likely to be TCP, and thus there is not much better opportunity for statistical traffic separation than by using the TOS/diffserv byte. While most traffic simply is not coloured today, the opportunity to colour in order to improve traffic separation is greater when there is an element involved that you are allowed to change. This is in essence a "poor man's explicit routing" in that the source (or something in between) can move traffic between one source and destination in a different way. That is somewhat different from using L4 type, which is and must always be invariant. Sean.