? Maybe i'm misunderstanding what your trying to say, but there are major differences between an ethernet + IP transport and other transports like fiber channel (or even token ring, atm, etc) which has built into the lowest layers buffer crediting / flow control, retransmission, prioritization, etc. Sure you can build much of that higher in the stack but it requires everything in the network to be playing the same game to assure QoS metrics, and if that's the case you don't really have a normal IP network anymore.
By transport protocol I mean layer 4. FC/TR/ATM/IB are (mostly) layer 2 protocols.
I think the idea is that Falcon assumes the underlying network is semi-crappy and works around that (e.g. Falcon assumes that packets arrive out of order then it puts them back in order).
