Subject: [Tsvwg] Re: What body is qualified to decide on Internet fairness

From: "Dah Ming Chiu" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 16 Jun 2007 21:20:07 +0800

Let me give my thoughts to your question.

1) I think Internet (IETF) did well by not imposing only
    one way to make connections - we have TCP and UDP
    - which was to keep the options open. There was no
    mandate of a single form of fairness.
2) The subsequent push for making everything "flow rate fair"
    (TCP-friendly) is well-intentioned, but in my humble opinion,
    ill-advised and futile. I wrote a short paper on this (see attached)
    and submitted it to HotNets two years ago.  I made some
    similar arguments as Briscoe's "Dismantling..." article,
    although not as blunt. Instead of cost-fairness, I proposed
    some other ideas for thought and discussion. Unfortunately,
    it was rejected.
3) In principle, I agree with Briscoe's "Dismantling..." article.
    Internet resource allocation should be tied to the market, and
    policies, not dictated by IETF.
4) Without having read about all the work on cost-fairness, I
    may not be doing it justice by saying that I doubt it is as simple
    as Briscoe claims (re-ECN stuff) to do the right thing (even
    assuming cost-fairness is what you want to implement).
    I want to take a little more care (and time) to give all my comments
    on that proposal, perhaps as another submission to HotNets - so
    keep your eye open for that.
5) My feeling is that this issue requires a broader discussion by all
    the people (academics and industry) who work on Internet's
    architecture. In the end, it will not be only a transport issue, but
    also affects accounting, billing, network access, ISP peering,
    routing, and maybe more.

Hopefully, all this noise will lead to a period of "renaissance" when
different traffic controls are experimented. I don't think we are in
danger of any "congestion collapse" worse than what p2p and ddos
traffic are already inflicting on us. In the end, we will evolve to 
something
more sensible for tsvwg to specify into protocols.

Dah Ming Chiu
http://personal.ie.cuhk.edu.hk/~dmchiu

---

From: "Dah Ming Chiu" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 16 Jun 2007 20:18:13 +0800

Dear Bob,

Let me give a short answer (to see if it will also make to the list).

I think in 1988 or earlier, congestion control was discussed almost
entirely from an engineering perspective.  Any sensible engineer
would soon realize that congestion control was allocating contended
resources to different users, and that was when "fairness" came up.
The biggest influence on the thinking probably came from computer
science (how to schedule computer processes) rather than economics.

A couple of notes:
1) In the "fairness" paper that I co-authored with Raj Jain and Bill Hawe,
    we did try to search for the meaning of fairness (axioms), which touched
    on some simple economic reasoning.
2) The more visible and sophisticated discourse on the economic implications
     came later, e.g. Shenker wrote about maximizing user utility functions
     in the mid 90s, and Kelly formulated the problem of congestion control 
as
     a problem of optimizing social welfare.
3) In the 80's, we did understand congestion control was not about 
allocating
    a single resource to users (as in the AIMD paper). We did understand
    different users may be using different resources, and the notion of 
max-min
    fairness and how to compute that. We did not publish any paper on that
    because we noticed Gallager had done that work ealier.

Regarding your current proposal about
a) dismantling...
b) cost-fairness
I think (a) should be discussed and practised in TSVWG; but (b) needs a
broader discussion among other people collectively working on the Internet
architecture nowadays. I will have more to say about these issues in 
follow-on
emails.

Regards
Dah Ming Chiu
http://personal.ie.cuhk.edu.hk/~dmchiu/

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Bob Briscoe" <[email-masked]>
To: "Dah Ming Chiu" <[email-masked]>; <[email-masked]>
Sent: Friday, June 15, 2007 8:34 AM
Subject: Your knowledge of CC history is needed on the tsvwg list

> Dah-Ming, KK,
>
> Could one of you enlighten the IETF tsvwg list (if you're not subscribed, 
> I can forward your comments) with your knowledge of how fairness was 
> thought about in 1988?
>
> See Wes Eddy's attempt to re-write history in the thread
> "What body is qualified to decide on Internet fairness?" at
> <http://www1.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/tsvwg/current/index.html>
>
> You may also want to contribute to the debate about the question of 
> fairness itself (I'd appreciate someone bringing the thread back on 
> topic!).
>
> Cheers
>
>
>
> Bob
>
>
> ____________________________________________________________________________
> Bob Briscoe, <[email-masked]>      Networks Research Centre, BT 
> Research
> B54/77 Adastral Park,Martlesham Heath,Ipswich,IP5 3RE,UK.    +44 1473 
> 645196

---

From: Wesley Eddy <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 18 Jun 2007 10:10:43 -0400

> ><http://www1.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/tsvwg/current/index.html>

That's a pretty hilarious accusation, given that the thread shows I
suggested we get clarification/verification from some of the original
designers ... thanks for the chuckle :).

-- 
Wesley M. Eddy
Verizon Federal Network Systems