Subject: Re: congestion control? - (was Re: Appointment of a Transport AreaDirector)

From: [email-masked] (Noel Chiappa)
Date: Wed, 6 Mar 2013 13:16:18 -0500 (EST)

> From: t.p. <[email-masked]>

    > is this something that the IETF should be involved with or is it better
    > handled by those who are developping LTE etc? 

I would _like_ to think it's better done by the IETF, since congestion
control/response more or less has to be done on an end-end basis, so trying
to do it in any particular link technology is not necessarily useful (unless
the entire connection path is across that technology). But...

    > From: Cameron Byrne <[email-masked]>

    > There is a huge cross layer optimization issue between 3gpp and the
    > ietf. It is worse than you can imagine, highly akin to how the industry
    > moved passed the ietf with Nat.

Well, I sort of see the analogy with NAT. But rather than rathole on a
non-productive discussion of similarities and causes, I think it's more
useful/fruitful to examine your point that people are doing all sorts of
localized hacks in an attempt to gain competitive advantage.

Sometimes this is not a problem, and they are (rightly) responding to places
where the IETF isn't meeting needs (one good example is traffic directors in
front of large multi-machine web servers).

But how much good going it alone will do in this particular case (since
congestion control is necessarily end-end) is unclear, although I guess the
'terminate (effectively) the end-end connection near the border of the
provider's system, and do a new one to the terminal at the user's device'
model works. But there definitely is a risk of layers clashing, both trying to
do one thing...

	Noel